"Bill's Gun Shop" is a truly bad movie that has, somewhere deep beneath its odd subplots and sidetracks, a reasonably good idea.

Made by gun lovers in Minnesota, the film seeks to show both sides of the gun issue. There are right-wing fanatics in the film who are meant to seem scary, and left-wing crybabies who are meant to be laughable. There's a protagonist whose conceal-and-carry permit ultimately empowers him, even while other experiences with guns nearly destroy his life. The film is neither a hooray-for-guns manifesto nor a liberal screed against them.

It is also, however, not a good movie by any common definition of that word. The acting is amateurish, the directing sloppy and the story all over the place. I literally laughed aloud at the film's two "fight" scenes, which are staged, filmed and edited as if the actors were mannequins that had to be repositioned for each shot.

Our hero is Dillon (Scott Cooper), a quiet young man who has just obtained a job at the titular gun shop working for the titular Bill (John Ashton). Bill himself is a hard man with a soft young trophy wife, Marla (Carolyn Hauck), who in one puzzling sequence comes on to Dillon in a most slutty fashion, giving this direct-to-DVD film its requisite tawdry sex scene.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The sex scene (and indeed, the entire Marla character) has nothing to do with the story. The story is that Dillon is kind of a pushover who comes to be more self-assured and assertive after getting his gun permit. Bill makes his employees wear guns when they're in the store, and once they have their permits, they have to carry guns ALL the time, even off-duty. I think this is weird, but I don't work in a gun store.

Bill's side job is bounty hunting, which he does with Rick (Victor Rivers), a no-nonsense Native American man who is friends with Dillon's family and brings a giggly girl named Wanda to their house for Easter dinner. In another peculiar scene, Rick saves the day when a group of rowdies harasses Dillon in the gun shop. His use of a particular racial slur in that scene is unmotivated and random. In other words, it's just like the rest of the film.

Dillon is the epitome of a bad protagonist in that he never acts but is instead acted upon. Not until the last few minutes does he ever do anything of his own choice. All of his actions are simply reactions to what's happening around him. He's mealy-mouthed and weak-willed. I understand the character is supposed to be in need of some confidence-boosting, but it's possible to convey that without the guy being completely useless as a character.

Director Dean Hyers (who co-wrote the screenplay with Rob Nilsson), a first-timer, comes up lacking in some very basic areas. He frequently shoots scenes so that the spatial relationships are unclear, i.e., we don't know where the characters are physically in relation to each other. In other cases, characters are present but don't do anything, or appear only in part of the frame, with no close-ups or reaction shots.

Boil the film down to its essential parts -- without the strange tangents and subplots -- and it's still not much of a story, nor has it been well-told in any way. It wants to explore the many facets of gun ownership (the potential good as well as the potential bad), but it gets bogged down in its goofy bounty hunter story. If Hyers goes on to make other films, "Bill's Gun Shop" will be the embarrassing, inauspicious one that started his career.

THE DVD

There are no alternate language tracks and no subtitles.

VIDEO: The anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) presentation is passable, nothing more. The picture is often dark and murky, with a lot of graininess. It wasn't shot with the best equipment available, but they didn't do themselves any favors with the transfer, either.

AUDIO: Dolby Digital 2.0. It's a decent mix. I didn't notice any major problems with it.

EXTRAS: Director Dean Hyers does a commentary that's amiable and reasonably interesting. He gives us the play-by-play on how the film was made, where the ideas came from, and so forth, and does it in a friendly, intelligent way.

The other major extra is something called "Gun Stories" (25:12), a featurette with cast and crew members talking about their own experiences with guns. It's similar to the movie itself: Many of them speak lovingly and fondly ... and then slowly the negative experiences come out. Guns are treated reverentially in the movie and in this featurette.

The film's trailer is here, as are production photos and brief bios of the cast.

One annoying thing: The extras menu is designed to look like a revolver, with each bullet representing a different extra. But you can't just click the one you want. You have to slowly spin the cylinder until the "bullet" you want is in the chamber. It's irritating.

IN SUMMARY

A bad movie, a middling DVD presentation -- if you're going to buy this movie, consider a 10-day waiting period first.