How Guns Akimbo Satirizes The Action Hero
Like many, my curiosity about Guns Akimbo was peaked when viral photos of Daniel Radcliffe wielding guns in a bathrobe and bear feet slippers began spreading. I had assumed the premise was going to be ridiculous, but I didn’t expect it to be a quality satire of the stereotypical action hero.
This film asks “what if the hero had no training, but no choice but to gun down bad guys?” and demonstrates how many of these characters are unrealistic at best and slightly silly at worst.
The Action Hero’s Training
Unlike New York Detective John McClain or military men akin to Sylvester Stalone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Guns Akimbo stars Miles Harris, a computer programmer for a company that develops microtransaction smartphone games. When he leaves work, his late-night passion involves trolling people on the message boards of Skizm, an extremely popular online deathmatch.
Because of his trolling, he angers the crime lord in charge of the site, Riktor, which causes him and his men to break into Miles’ house and surgically graft guns onto his hands. Miles has no previous training and is quite unathletic, making his being thrust into Skizm a continual series of blunders just to survive.
This alone shows how action heroes are not like ordinary people in the slightest. Any regular person thrown into this situation would likely be like Miles, running a lot while getting lucky, or accidental, shots in along the way.
The Action Hero’s Motivation
A typical action hero swings into combat because a loved one has been kidnapped, or there is some larger threat to the world that needs dismantling. This is motivation enough for them to beat the odds and singlehandedly save the day.
Miles, on the other hand, was forced to play this role because he pissed off the wrong person. He would have rather done anything than participate in a Skizm fight to the death, so he constantly runs from those pursuing him.
Instead of fighting back, he tries to seek help from the police, his love interest, and his workplace. Each of these fails spectacularly as he alarms people with his guns or those pursuing him burst in and start shooting.
This is a consistent issue, for Guns Akimbo’s hero constantly finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not only do those familiar to him harmed, he also manages to stumble into a drug deal between rival gangs which ends in a gunfight.
This pokes fun at the idea that all someone needs to conquer innumerable bad guys is to be highly motivated and try really hard. The viewer sees another example of how the action hero is unrealistic. Miles acts like how most people would in this situation: get help and avoid the danger at all costs.
The Final Battle & Getting The Girl
When the action hero plows through their troves of villains, they always stop at the Kingpin of whatever evil force is attacking. This person typically has the hero’s loved one captive with a gun to their head, some sort of detonator, or anything else that places them in an ultimatum.
The hero must use their wits to stop the leader without harming anyone else. When they accomplish that, everyone celebrates, they get the girl/guy, and all is well.
In Guns Akimbo, Miles has one bullet left to stop Riktor, the crime boss behind Skizm, and save his love interest, Nova. As the tension heightens, Miles misses the shot completely, and gets shot multiple times by Riktor, but manages to stumble forward enough to push the villain off the rooftop.
Instead of Nova embracing her courageous savior, she begins screaming in shock at everything. He doesn’t get the girl in the end, but she does create a comic book inspired by his actions, toting him as a hero named Guns Akimbo.
Conclusion
Guns Akimbo shows how the Hollywood action hero is extraordinary and mythical. Though audiences like an underdog story of one highly motivated individual beating insurmountable evil, these characters are not based in reality. No single person could take out hundreds of armed thugs with only a few scrapes and bruises at the end.
Miles’ antics show how an ordinary person would navigate these odds. His successes were largely due to luck and he nearly died anyway. Despite all of that, he was canonized as a comic book hero and beloved by the viewers of Skizm.
The final scene where Miles sees his newly published comic book persona is where the greatest satire is shown, for one could read this as a critique of audience relationships to action characters. Viewers know, at some level, that these characters wouldn’t function in real life, but they are still hailed as badass and aspirational.
Guns Akimbo shows where the cracks lie beneath the myths and makes some laughs along the way. It simultaneously is a critique and a great action film and hopefully will lead to more thoughtful takes on the action genre.
