American Gun

Aric Avelino shows an almost tender restraint in his story-telling, not pounding us with a message but simply looking steadily at how guns have made these lives difficult.

While this is not exactly a hopeful movie, it's a polished exercise in the kind of social commentary that can wake people up.

The last act of American Gun is quite possibly one of the most ridiculous and forced dramatic twists I've seen in years.

All of the stories are conceived as ongoing plights, and have no third act. Which would be an improvement on Haggis's hyperbolic civics lesson if Avelino had the chops to master realism and embrace ambivalence. The acting is pro enough to keep your blood up, but the reverb is minimal.

The film is haphazardly structured, undercutting its potential power.

A painfully earnest but dramatically inert film.

This is "Crash" with gun violence substituted for racism, although the tone of director–co-writer Aric Avelino's debut feature may be closer to one of those pious public-safety films that used to be shown to schoolchildren in order to frighten them out of potential bad behavior.