Just Got Made: “Guns Akimbo” (2020)

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O.K. motherf*ckers, you wanna know what I’m looking at in this column?! You wanna know what I’m looking at?! At us, and at movies holding up a mirror to contemporary experience that Just Got Made.

“We must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.”

- Roland Barthes

“Guns Akimbo” is now irrevocably the film that’s both about and embroiled in a painful online saga with offline consequences. Writer/director Jason Lei Howden responded to his encounter with online doxing of a film critic with reflexive online vigilantism. The fallout, as I write this, continues. Robert Daniels’ piece - NO SOLUTIONS: A PERSONAL EXAMINATION OF ONLINE ANGER ABOUT GUNS AKIMBO on Roger Ebert Dot Com is the best encapsulation and articulation of the situation to date.

Distancing art from the artist is hard. If you’ve ever prescribed to the concept of the auteur in cinema, as I have and do, I can empathise with your impulse to consume (or not consume) something when one of the critical creatives acts or behaves in a reprehensible way. Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette,” does a great job of talking about the fact that Fine Art criticism has moved beyond the association of art and artist that continues to plague critical thought on screen culture. Gadsby proclaims; “High art, my arse. The history of western art is just the history of men painting women like they’re flesh vases for their dick flowers.” If one was brittle in the face the darkest spots of that history, one could not fully embrace the beauty forged in their hand.

This past weekend, The César Awards - in essence, the French Academy Awards - awarded Roman Polanski the award for Best Director for “An Officer and a Spy”. At the moment of the announcement, the creative team behind the utterly mesmerising “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” stormed out of the theatre. Their exit laced with musical utterances of protest. It may seem complicated that one can simultaneously praise the right to protest, while simultaneously wishing to see the film in question. Polanski’s deplorable acts aren’t in question. However, should those acts mean that I’m never going to watch “Chinatown” again? Equally no. And perhaps more complicated still is the question of reviewing the art by a controversial figure to interrogate accusations surrounding that figure.

I respect, support and endorse your right to consume things with a look at the morality of the producers for every product and entertainment. One never wants to cross the line to incinerating texts from producers that don’t reflect our values. That practice was popularised by a group (amongst other things) that I would instead set myself ablaze than be associated with.

In his seminal essay “The Death of the Author,” literary theorist Roland Barthes emphatically proclaims that default to authorial presence and intent “is to impose a limit on that text.” Why is it so hard in the screen medium? After everything that we know about Michael Jackson, should we feel terrible about unabashedly adoring “Thriller”? Should possibly millions of people with an affinity and affection for those tracks, and whose memories can be accessed in the time machine synapses that formative songs can access never spin that record again? And just playing that out, are we waiting on the film rating like that which are mandated on Australian food outlets? Every restaurant in Australia has a rating for hygiene, cleanliness and sanity food practices that must be displayed on the entry to premises. Should we have an equivalent for the problematic people involved in the film? We could do an assessment when the film is produced and then a revisitation a decade or so in the future; just in case. I feel like one question begets another like the heads of Hydra.

And here we are, back at “Guns Akimbo” and the decision to review this film. I saw many people take a stand to deny the film coverage, which they know would (en masse) have an impact on the production’s bottom line and Hollywood’s great amoral equaliser. If your film bombs welcome to movie jail, do not pass ‘Go’; do not collect $200 - or you have your next project green-lit. Real talk, he’s white and I mean Max fucking Landis ... so maybe he gets another chance on the condition of slightly less bad behaviour.

I paused on my review, I hesitated. I regret that hesitation. It afforded me more time to think, wrestle with the cancellation of the film and all the creative talent on show that wasn’t Howden. Until, I was emboldened by specifically the incredible Walter Chaw - Senior Film Critic for Film Freak Central. While a chorus bloomed in protest, Mr Chaw boldly tackled the text and its context in the complicated ecosystem of cinema. It’s the review of the film both pre and mainly post the cloud bank of controversy, “Guns Akimbo” deserved. It’s perhaps an even more effective text to examine the strange desires for impulsive and misguided social media justice. It’s all too perverse and poetic a fate for Howden. He fulfils the prophecy of “Guns Akimbo”.

“Guns Akimbo” delivers a refreshed streaming mash-up of “Running Man”/“Battle Royale”. It incorporates elements of Cronenberg-style body horror. It adopts Leigh Whannell’s “Upgrade” and “The Invisible Man” body-anchored dynamic camera movement. It unfolds in breakneck “does not wear out its welcome” speedy running time. For me, those complementary technical and entertainment factors are underpinned by something more immediate and deeply primal.

Daniel Radcliffe plays Miles; the eventual begrudging gun toter played in this fascinating counter Potter programming run. A game designer in a fearful cycle of being let go from the profoundly unfulfilling coding job for a life suck of a game. He’s a collector, recently dumped and stuck in the repetitive record scratch of a pay credit to pay credit life. The Promethean toil of that grind through to make ends meet are deeply relatable. Miles uses the forums on ‘Skizm’ - a site for underground streaming death-matches - as his outlet. That is until the troll gets GUNS SURGICALLY ATTACHED TO HIS HANDS (suggestion - best to be read like Dr Evil says “Sharks with laser beams attached to their heads) to forcibly join the game.

The reptilian brain impulses can be seen as Miles is sitting at home alone, wielding fury behind his keyboard under the influence of a range of intoxicants. I’m not talking about a drugged-up cocktail - I’m talking about the lowering the oppressive, endless cycle of day job inhibitions and signing into a social forum - that by definition feels like it’s anonymous. Intellectually loosening up with a few beers and readying oneself for a series of encounters. Every antagonistic slander receives a volley of offence and what “Guns Akimbo” registers and portrays so beautifully is those repeat doses of dopamine injected into your cerebral cortex with the drama of a “Pulp Fiction” adrenaline shot. It was one of the first times I’d seen that desire to participate in forums with the same abandon that you throw on "Gears of War."

An old work buddy exposed me to this mindset first hand in a way that those internet urban legends could never prepare me for. We’re on a long train commute at a job I was working part-time to put myself through University. On one of many nights we commuted together he educated me on what I’d later learn was trolling. This guy, evidently, was a fucking trolling trendsetter. He shared one particular story that took anonymous shit-talking to new levels of perverse and unsavoury. He educated me on the tragic “right-to-die” denial of Terri Schiavo - a case that if you click here - describes the most horrific conflict for a women’s right to end her life. This guy made my blood run cold with tales of baiting the bitter supporters of Schiavo on forums and Facebook groups with platitudes that turned into the most deliberately incendiary insults and online torment. I remember a sick puzzling feeling. I was trying to find the funny. I was trying to do the internal calculations in my mind that would help to solve the equation. As laughs extinguished, I had to ask, “what made you want to do something like that.” He responded, “Oh, Blake, the internet isn’t REAL.” In “Deadwood” parlance we’d call that “a lie agreed upon.”

Samara Weaving is a fucking revelation. In “Guns Akimbo” Weaving plays Nix the undefeated champion ‘Skizm’. Nix is like an action movie answer to Tyler Durden from “Fight Club”. The audience is Edward Norton’s hypnotised Jack. Once you’re introduced to her, she has a quality that seems to tap to tap into every action kink and desire that you have. Weaving sells balletic “John Wick” gun-fu. Weaving’s driving delivers on those “Fast and Furious” style slow-mo vehicular spins, with the added fun that they’re helping her set up nastily delivered kill shots. The Nix car spins in “Guns Akimbo” would make “2 Fast 2 Furious” aroused. And there’s a moment that she ascends to the top of a bus wielding a midi gun and homaging T-800’s leather threads from “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” that almost made me do a backflip.

Online movie writing trailblazer turned sci-fi author screen-writer of terrific films like “Sinister” C. Robert Cargill aka @Massawyrm tweeted the following: “After MAYHEM, READY OR NOT, and GUNS AKIMBO, a number of folks are gonna wake up to the fact that Samara Weaving will be one of the great action stars of the 20s.” In “Mayhem” - Joe Lynch’s divinely directed corporate vengeance thrill ride - Weaving partners with Steven Yeun to punish big business oppressors. “Mayhem” was that perfect cold-brewed coffee that gave you the energy that resembled a bonus life in a video game paired with heart arrhythmia. In “Ready or Not” Weaving dons the mantle of the badass bride as she’s dragged unwittingly into a wealthy family’s sacrificial practices that maintain their deal with the devil. “Ready or Not” and “Guns Akimbo” are us staying loyal to the same barista.

Howden’s impulse to enact the same online justice seem like someone drilled keyboard to each of his hands. His deplorable actions are the ammunition misfires into a crowd. The victims of abuse and doxing are more often than not women, and especially women of colour. Their online universe is a fucking waking nightmare of hostile interrogation online. A dear friend of mine wrote about Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker displaying poor contouring skills and sub-par hair dying practices and received death threats. Her piece, was OF COURSE a joke. The threats were not a joke, that’s the fucking disturbing reality. These events have actualised and materialised the thematic scream of “Guns Akimbo”; whether you see it or not.

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