Dammit, I really need to POOP!
For a modern take on the ancient gladiators of yore, Guns Akimbo (2019) isn’t a bad take on the emptiness that supposedly afflicts every new generation. Miles is its embodiment, a meek programmer at a company that creates kids’ games in order to “suck money out of the wallets of their parents.”
Then he stumbles into a game for adults, games that are a lot tougher.
A lot bloodier.
Rather … final.
And Miles is a pacifist vegetarian.
But when a psychotic is firing guns at you, and you find yourself with guns in your hands, there’s not a lot of choice, no matter how long or far Miles is willing to take the old Dr. Who dictum And lots of running! Discovering that pacifism has little traction against the irrationality that permeates the cosmos in which he finds himself, it eventually becomes clear that the creatures who stand in his way are but the rocks in the wall up which he must clamber to find … God. The God that has ordered his gladiatorial self into an especially bloody Hell (and one that moves very slowly, at that!), purely to collect wealth from those creatures of the original realm who may, themselves, inadvertently cross over.
Because this God wants to infect our world with his sensibilities, one might say.
So what can one say about a person who traverses the moral spectrum from pacifism to … deicide? Is this a story arc or what?!
It’s a little bit too whiney, but more than willing to subvert expectations and make jokes about genitalia guaranteed to leave the guys clutching their crotches. Guns Akimbo starts out wobbly, but, as my Arts Editor said, It didn’t suck nearly as much as I thought it would.
But it’s not as funny as it wishes it were. The humor, if you will, comes from the entire package, and will be found only through gritted teeth.
