If you like your action flicks a little left of centre and bordering on the gruesome then Guns Akimbo is the film for you. The fresh creative nature of the film shows why Jason Lei Howden is a director who can potentially breathe creativity into the genre

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 10, 2025

Jason Lei Howden doesn’t hold back on the brutal, violent, bloody, extremely over-the-top action, and as long as the viewer is able to accept this purposefully unrealistic depiction of a real-life videogame death match, it’s a blast of pure entertainment.

| Original Score: B | Jul 24, 2023

Borrowing heavily from the many others, Guns Akimbo is a super-charged, hyper frenetic joy ride back to the days of violent action science-fiction

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 23, 2021

[B]y mimicking the breathless tempo of a video game, Howden falls prey to video-game problems: the violence is unreal and weightless; the up-to-the-minute visuals seem immediately dated...

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 17, 2021

Aims for wild but settles on obnoxious and grating.

| Mar 28, 2021

...a decidedly over-the-top premise that's employed to exceedingly (and, mostly, excessively) frenetic effect by Howden...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 17, 2020

I like the style of the movie but, for a movie called guns akimbo, about guns being bolted to someone's hands, it should have had much more guns akimbo.

| Jul 18, 2020

"Guns Akimbo" is a blast, literally. Daniel Radcliffe does an exceptional job portraying a nerdy angry troll who gets thrust into the underground social media world he didn't ask for."

| Original Score: 9.4/10 | Jul 13, 2020

It's like playing a video game that tries to teach us how bad video games are. Does that make sense? Of course it doesn't. Neither does this.

| Original Score: C- | Jul 8, 2020

Aims for bad taste, but it's just tasteless.

| Jun 30, 2020

Daniel Radcliffe is very good in this movie, but the film starts to lose steam once you realize that it doesn't really have much else to offer beyond these high-energy action sequences.

| Original Score: B- | Jun 17, 2020

Even if the theme of internet addiction feels a bit lazy, the fun is watching Radcliffe's nerdy character get in way over his head.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 17, 2020

All of this works for the type of movie that Howden was trying to make, which is a video game-style massacre for twenty-something gamers.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 7, 2020

Howden's film gives itself a good three minutes to play the amateur satirist before it abandons any pretense of cultural commentary and instead embraces every cliché it repeatedly insists it is undermining.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Apr 30, 2020

'Guns Akimbo' is a techno-punk audiovisual work. A forced view to ask us what kind of representations, in our neoliberal context, we want and which we try to avoid. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 17, 2020

"Guns Akimbo" feels more like a missed opportunity. It may have been pacey and some of the acrobatic cameraworks are technically impressive but Jason Lei Howden's script is so hollow that it's hard to care much about everything been going on here.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 14, 2020

The film is excessive, histrionic, and perfect for enjoying the actions without any sort of ethical or esthetic filter. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 25, 2020

If Guns Akimbo is meant to be a satire of gamer culture and cesspit comments sections, Black Mirror has done it more often and to much greater effect.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 25, 2020

The comedic bullet bonanza that is Guns Akimbo checks all the boxes for a film festival midnight madness movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 19, 2020

[Guns Akimbo] - which kicks off as a satire on online bullying never seems to get it paddles back into coherence.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 13, 2020