★★★★
“Don’t bring a spork to a gunfight!”
Harry Potter, this is not. If it’s difficult to separate Radcliffe from the hero of the movie franchise, this is the kind of film which should help considerably. He plays Miles, a computer programmer and online troll, who trolls the wrong people. Specifically, the ones who run Skizm, an increasingly popular and hyper-violent online streaming service, which broadcasts death-matches between contestants. For his sins, Miles is knocked out, and wakes to find himself with guns bolted to both hands. He is now Skizm’s latest contestant, going up against their reigning champion, Nix (Weaving). And to encourage him, the man who runs the game, Riktor (Dennehy), has kidnapped Miles’s intermittent girlfriend, Nova (Bordizzo). To survive, he’s going to need help from a most unusual source: Nix.
This is the kind of incessantly kinetic, brutal action film that you’ll probably either love or hate. I was pushed firmly into the latter company by Samara Weaving, who is a coke-snorting, chain-gun wielding, spiky package of undiluted and venomous awesome. While Miles is the nominal lead character, Nix was considerably more fun to watch, and also has the better character arc. For example, her actions have considerably better motivations, considering Miles is basically trolling for the LOLs. There’s plenty of her in action to appreciate too, pushing this out of the “supporting girl with gun” category into qualification. I haven’t yet seen Birds of Prey, but suspect Weaving would have been an admirable alternate to Margot Robbie.
I’m interested, if somewhat confused, about the moral message being sent here – or whether there is one at all. It’s both condemning the audience for violent entertainment… while, very clearly, feeding that same appetite. Any sense of intellectual superiority over the masses is similarly undercut by the extremely low-brow humour. Have you ever considered how hard it would be to go to the bathroom with your hands locked around firearms? Me neither. But with his writer’s cap on, Howden clearly has. Yet this does help insulate the film from suggestions of hypocrisy, its broken spiritual compass and disjointed one-liners a fitting match for the ADHD and morally bankrupt world it is depicting. Though the most implausible thing here, might be the way Miles’s fuzzy slippers stay on. I can’t even go down the stairs without mine making a bid for independence from my feet.
The action is almost non-stop, and the blood flows in rivers, to the point that it becomes almost a caricature of the more extreme end of video-gaming. It’s staged fairly well, though does occasionally topple over into the manic style of editing which is the bane of modern cinema. Things build towards the expected climax, in which Miles and Nix mount an all-out assault on Riktor’s headquarters, delivering one final shot of adrenaline-powered hyper-mayhem to your lizard brain. If not all the characters receive quite the fate you want, there’s enough here to make me believe Weaving has action heroine superstar potential.
Dir: Jason Lei Howden
Star: Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Ned Dennehy