Grade: B+

Verdict: 'Bowling for Columbine' shoots blanks with firearm theories, but Michael Moore makes you think

Details: Directed by Michael Moore. Featuring Marilyn Manson, Charlton Heston and Dick Clark. Rated R for some violent images and language. 119 minutes. Limited release

See it: Local theaters and showtimes for [an error occurred while processing this directive]Bowling for Columbine

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Michael Moore is a sloppy journalist whose appetite for the laugh makes him only a few degrees more useful than the journo-jokers at "The Daily Show" and a lot less useful than, say, Mike Wallace at "60 Minutes." He's something in between, a comedian after the truth who deploys ambush tactics without the skill and discipline to know what to do with them.

With his outsized glasses, rumpled baseball cap, four-day beard and schlumpy girth, Moore has fashioned himself a blue-collar superhero standing up for the concerns of average Americans. He's a human cartoon, sans cape, galumphing to his next unsuspecting subject and demanding answers for a host of injustices.

Now Moore wants to know why Americans kill each other with guns at such a breathtaking rate in the fascinating but frustrating docu-essay "Bowling for Columbine." No doubt the movie is an entertaining, edifying and wildly provocative chunk of reporting. (With Moore, I'm almost tempted to write "infotainment.") But it's also spongy and glib, news as crowd-pleaser. It's not easy to take seriously someone whose reporting features so many man-on-the-street surveys, la Jay Leno.

Invariably a character in his own films and TV shows ("TV Nation," "The Awful Truth"), Moore pinballed through the hit 1989 documentary "Roger & Me" in hot pursuit of General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, who the filmmaker blamed for mass layoffs at the GM plant in Flint, Mich., Moore's hometown. Corporate venality and institutionalized social ills squirm in the cross hairs of Moore's leftist shade of righteous ire.

There's something naggingly slipshod about Moore's methods. He walks away from deeper digging once he's met his laugh quota and has the transparent habit of interviewing famous people about things they couldn't possibly comment intelligently about just to make them bumble on camera.

That said, how Moore swaddles snapshots of modern American woe in comic irony is a small gift. And if you accept a work like "Bowling for Columbine" as polemic-as-entertainment or a social survey for pop audiences, without ignoring its gaping holes, you might have a fine time.

Moore uses the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Co., as his jumping-off point into a legitimate screed against our nation's love affair with firearms. He interviews members of the Michigan Militia, which once included members Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who would go on to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He allows those men and women to explain why guns rule. (The Second Amendment becomes the film's incantatory echo.)

He hangs out at the farm of Nichols' brother, John, as the guy buries himself in Swiss-cheese logic and unintentional irony. ("There's wackos out there," he says. Uh, yeah.)

Moore peels back an America many may not know, but where many live. At a Michigan bank, Moore is awarded a hunting rifle for opening a savings account and buys ammo at a barber shop. We're shown the rabid, bizarrely anachronistic bellowing of Charlton Heston at National Rifle Association rallies and presented digestible if profoundly troubling statistics about gun fatalities in the United States. For example, in the same year the United Kingdom had 68 gun deaths, the U.S. had 11,127. Most chillingly, we see uninterrupted security camera footage of the Columbine killers' rampage.

Why, why, why? Moore asks with growing passion as he rattles off more and more alarming killings, like a Michigan first-grader who shot his 6-year-old classmate.

Moore never gets a handle on an answer, deciding to run with the idea of fear. America is a nation trembling under fearmongering politicians and hysterical media reports that are perversely fixated on African American crime. Hate and fear sell, Moore decides, and that's why we're shooting each other.

It's a provocative and partially true thesis, but Moore can't flesh it out, because, I suspect, it doesn't hold water. Who's killing whom is the equation he avoids. If militia nuts are hoarding firearms out of fear of government, minorities and their strange neighbors, why aren't they the ones who shoot people?

It seems to me that random psychotics, domestic flare-ups, inner-city gang warfare and daily crime are responsible for many more shooting deaths. Moore doesn't make it clear if he's blaming murders or the proliferation of gun ownership on fear. Obviously the latter is somewhat true, but I don't think a convenience store thug is afraid of much, especially not the things so-called gun nuts are literally up in arms about.

At least Moore is thinking about this stuff and making an earnest, and often very funny, effort to suss out meaning. "Bowling for Columbine" is not great journalism, nor great cinema. Yet, unlike too many movies, it actually wakes you up and gets those little gears upstairs whirring with curiosity and, quite possibly, anger.

— Chris Garcia, Austin American-Statesman