YMMV / Guns Akimbo

• Adorkable:
  • Miles, by virtue of being a panicking, nerdy everyman played by Harry Potter himself.
  • Nix is an odd example, since she's not exactly cuddly, but she's very excited by the prospect of cocaine and makes a variety of video game and cartoon references, the dorkiness of which creates a strangely endearing contrast to her badass persona.
• Complete Monster: Riktor is the mastermind behind Skizm, monetizing violent death matches to be streamed for profit. An unstable psychopath, Riktor throttles one of his directors to death over a triviality, and when hero Miles Lee Harris insults Skizm over the web, Riktor tracks him down and forces him to be a contestant, having him hunted by the vicious Phoenix "Nix" Degraves with no care for the bystanders who are killed. Nix is the daughter of a cop who tried to stop Riktor, prompting Riktor to plant a bomb and burn the man's wife and son alive, turning Nix into a conditioned monster. To force Miles to play, Riktor murders one of his friends and kidnaps his old girlfriend with threats to torture her to death if Miles does not fight Nix. Gleeful about taking Skizm global, Riktor only cares for murder, mayhem and profit while he films it all.
• Crosses the Line Twice: When Miles runs into policemen who demand he drop his guns, one of the viewers comments "If I wanted to watch people die this miserably, I'd visit Grandma."
• Magnificent Bitch: Phoenix "Nix" Degraves is the feared reigning champion of Skizm, with the skills to dispatch dozens of opponents at a time. Set to fight protagonist Mile Lee Harris, Nix disguises herself as a cop to break into a precinct and track Miles' phone, amicably giving him pointers on how to fight whilst hunting him through Shrapnel City after finding him. When Miles reveals to her Skizm's head Riktor orchestrated her family's deaths, Nix joins forces with him, faking killing Miles so the duo can break into Riktor's base, gunning through swathes of his men. Eventually surrounded, Nix, adamant to die on her own terms, uses a suicide bomb to kill Riktor's remaining forces and allowing Miles to hunt down and kill Riktor himself.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In 2018, long before most people even knew of the film's title (and long before it came out), the first stills with Daniel Radcliffe wearing a bathrobe and bear slippers, having the guns nailed to his hands and making a crazy face became meme fodder.
  • Due to Daniel Radcliffe starring in this movie and also starring in the Harry Potter series many years before, the meme "Harry Potter and the Second Amendment" became a common meme on Youtube comments in videos of the trailers to this movie.
• One-Scene Wonder: The homeless guy played by Rhys Darby appears in only six scenes, and has lines in about four of them, but he winds up as one of the funniest parts of the movie.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Prior to the film's release, director Jason Lei Howden accused two Black critics who disliked the film of bullying a white film writer until she had attempted suicide, going so far as to say they should be charged with attempted murder ^note This wasn't true - the writer in question had been caught using racist slurs in their private messages, which led to widespread criticism when the messages were made public, attacking them through both his personal Twitter account and the official account for the film. This led to a massive backlash and boycott of the movie from critics, and the movie briefly being removed from Saban's release calendar (it was eventually restored).
• Squick: Miles eats a half hotdog given him by a homeless man. It's eight months old, and Miles drops it in trash including a used condom.
• Too Cool to Live: Nix.
• Vanilla Protagonist: In comparison to Nix, Miles is a pretty dime-a-dozen Unlucky Everydude protagonist who's an unwilling hero thrust into adventure, with little to no backstory beyond still being hung up on his ex-girlfriend. Nix by contrast is the troubled daughter of a police officer who lost most of her family in a car bomb when she was young, the trauma of which lead to her becoming mentally unstable and falling into a life of crime, before being Forced into Evil when Riktor "recruited" her for Skism, and is now a drug-addicted Jerkass Woobie badass with a snarky sense of humour. This crosses into They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character / They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, as Nix would have made a much more compelling protagonist if the story was based around her.

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