*½/****
starring James Coburn, Virginia Madsen, Barbara Bain, Alexandra Holden
written and directed by Alan Jacobs
by Walter Chaw "Dear Penny, I'm in Las Vegas tonight. It's hot, it's very very hot, but I'm close." So goes the tenor of James Coburn's narration in the mawkish, unfocused American Gun, an Alan Jacobs film that seeks to trace the history of a gun as a means to either indict the lack of regulation in gun sales, the way that Las Vegas is the city of sin, or the failure of almost all films to use flashbacks in different media separated by letters from an old man to his murdered daughter. What the picture doesn't do is find much culpability in the perpetrators themselves, choosing at every turn to suggest that it is the gun itself that is the source of evil rather than our broken culture, the essential failure of many of our school systems (the only demographic with higher self-esteem than public-school children are convicted felons, giving lie to the idea that teaching self-esteem in place of reading and math is such a very good idea), and the squeamish nullification of consequence that is at the root of all this fear, frustration, and madness. American Gun–essentially the Coburn character's odyssey on the trail of the gun that killed his daughter (Virginia Madsen)–is never terribly successful as politics or entertainment, but it sinks to a new low when it gets mired at its conclusion in an unforgivable miasma of trick endings and stupid surprises. Already bad and made far worse, the film's message is terminally obscured by pathological righteousness and just too much cuteness.
