Guns Akimbo (2020)

User Review

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  d_riptide

  5 / 10

  Style vs. substance has always been somewhat of a norm that films have come to rely on a little too much as the years have passed and “Guns Akimbo” is another one of the many MANY examples of how that can cripple a films quality. It’s a brash, crass and often mind-numbing ride that somehow managed to make even the more satisfactory aspects of the movie less tolerable. ⁣I did get a kick out of some of the action sequences, the acting packs a lot of energy (I admire the fact that Samara Weaving continues to be such a badass), every once in a while the set design would result in some good aesthetics, its mostly fast-paced, very tongue-in cheek when it knows what it wants to do, I appreciated it’s overly video game approach as a satire on overamped gamer culture and because of that I was never BORED per se. It’s just that what the film packs in thrills, there’s either too little investment in its premise or too much of it. The production values are fine as far as aspect ratio and music go but it’s cinematography and editing are highly frantic to a fault, dialogue is nothing but exposition, there’s hardly any character progression, plot structure offered more limitations than progressions, some of the references and musical choices came off as pandering and it’s vague messages are really muddled. Not to mention they can also come off as pandering also due to the way it was handled here because most of them either don’t create a lasting impact for the rest of the runtime or it’s never fully taken advantage of. It’s preachy as hell and it doesn’t even know what it’s trying to be preachy about. ⁣
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  Out of everything I didn’t like, it’s the technical aspects that pretty much exacerbate all of its other problems and exemplifies frustrating mechanics inside a film that offered a lot a promise but ended up being aggressively mediocre. Oh yes, even without the frenetic camera and editing botching over most of the scenes, the entire presentation, execution and direction of this movie is the very definition of exhaustion and irritation. For a film trying to appeal to gamers, they sure had me contemplating reaching for the killswitch.

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