Guns Akimbo  ★★½

THE sci-fi action film Guns Akimbo has all the credentials for being something out of the box.

It’s written and directed by Jason Lei Howden whose first feature was the inventive and hilariously gory Deathgasm released in 2015.

Lei Howden is also a former visual effects man so has an eye for what will pop on-screen and might be a little different.

It stars Daniel Radcliffe, who has made a habit of doing some off-the-wall stuff in recent times, and Australian Samara Weaving, who made an impact in last year’s Ready or Not.

And it was filmed in Germany and New Zealand, which should provide another point of difference.

Unfortunately, the script amounts to little more than a neat idea – a guy wakes up with guns stuck to his hands – and the execution becomes repetitive.

It’s slightly into the future and Radcliffe is Miles, an everyman who gets on the wrong side of an organisation called Skizm while he is playing their on-line video game.

As punishment they send a bunch of thugs to his apartment, bash him, nail guns to his hands and throw him into the game which is played out in real-life with millions following from the comfort of their loungerooms.

Miles’ ex- girlfriend Nova is also kidnapped and he is forced to go up against one of the game’s most successful combatants, Nix, played by Weaving.

This leads to one of the biggest faults of the film – how the hell a bloke who barely knows one end of a gun from another is able to evade a deadly, experienced foe?

On the plus side, Radcliffe is fun, the action decent and it’s all over relatively quickly.

But the best parts of the film are those with no action where Miles struggles to manipulate his ‘gun hands’ to open a door or go to the toilet.