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If the nineties was the age of the overblown disaster movie, then the noughties has seen the rise of the issue-based film. It's almost as though Hollywood has found a semblance of a conscience and an unlikely penchant for introspection of late.

We've had racism in 'Crash', drugs in 'Traffic', Tobacco in 'The Insider' and now 'American Gun'. No prizes for guessing what the topic du jour is.

And there could not have been a more pertinent moment for it, coming as it does on the back of spiralling gun violence locally, and four shocking school shootings in the United States.

The film borrows heavily from 'Crash' in terms of its format, in which several parallel stories are played out — some of them linked — which trace the impact that guns or gun crime have on various characters.

We meet the brother of a boy who gunned down his classmates before turning the gun on himself; there's also the survivor of a school shooting who's trying to carve out a life for herself, and who by a twist of fate earns pocket money by working in her grandfather's gun shop.

Donald Sutherland slips easily into the charming granddaddy role, someone for whom guns are a craft, not a weapon, giving the wholesome NRA-style face to the gun lobby, albeit with zero menace. Forrest Whitaker too turns in a solid performance as the overworked headmaster of an inner-city school, battling against the odds to turn it around.

But this kind of multi-character, multi-narrative film needs more than just believable characters and incidental links between narratives to maintain its momentum. And it's here that 'American Gun' loses pace. For all its film noir techniques and point-of-view shooting, it just lacks the substance to really hit its audience hard.

There are exceptions, though. A scene in a gun superstore is pure genius for its bright-eyed all-American veneer that turns a life-changing decision into something utterly mundane.

But moments like these are few in a plot that is largely predictable. While it raises some interesting questions — how should a local community treat the mother of a boy who killed several classmates and then himself? is there any alternative for good people who live in fear? — it does little in the way of offering answers, or even really examining the issues.

And so we're left with a fractured narrative that is not nearly as clever as it purports to be, and which at times errs on the side of sentimentality.

This is by no means a bad film, but it's one that's crying out for a resolution. Sadly, it shies away from any outright proselytising, preferring simply to offer, by implication, a lukewarm conclusion of: guns, sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're not.

'American Gun' may be entertaining, but as a thought-provoking film, it’s firing blanks.