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@MovieJay's Review of Machine Gun Preacher



Machine Gun Preacher
details the improbable but true evolution of Sam Childers, a Pennsylvania ex-con and drug addict who is born again as a missionary and eventually finds himself a mercenary in war-ravaged Sudan. Yes, you read that correctly; it's a mouthful of plot and boy does this movie have a lot of plot. If indeed there is a greater power unknown to us until after we perish, they truly do move in mysterious ways in the case of Childers who in the opening scene is being released from prison.

Back home with his wife Lynn and their daughter, Sam is infuriated to find the fridge empty of beer and that Lynn has given up her gig as a stripper at the local night-club in favor of a day job that gives her benefits and self-respect. "Better that you lost her to the Lord than to the milkman", notes Sam's best friend Donnie (Michael Shannon). Together, Sam and Donnie pick up their rock 'n roll ways, wreaking havoc, boozing and drugging all leading to one terrifying sequence where they cheat a murder rap that appears to hang over them after an episode with a hitchhiker they've picked up turns brutally violent. Lynn awakens in the middle of the night to find Sam in the bathroom washing blood from his clothes. Ashamed, Sam joins Lynn and their daughter to Sunday mass where Sam starts the process of being born again.

Things start to look up for Sam.  He fits well into his new life and starts growing into the role of father and provider through a new job on a construction site. In his spare time, he drafts up a plan to construct a church near their home designed particularly for bad-ass sinners of his ilk; strippers, addicts, etc. With a week to go on the contract, the sermon that Sunday at church is given by a Christian missionary preacher who has worked in the Sudan. "I reckon they could use some help", admits Sam at the dinner table that evening as he announces to his family his intention or rather, his calling to work in the African country.

His first trip to Sudan is an eye-opener as he learns about Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, a terror-based outfit that has forced young boys to take up arms, used girls as sex slaves, raped women, killed hundreds of thousands and burned entire villages out of existence. He dives eagerly into his new calling while on a ride north with freedom fighters and visits a make-shift hospital filled with wounded victims of the LRA. In another scene, Sam runs to the rescue of a boy whose legs have been blown off by a landmine.

Undeterred, Sam flies  back to the U.S. to raise more capital for his plan to buy some land in the Sudan and continue on with his project to help children there. He begins to deliver the sermons at his church in PA and the speeches begin to take on an angry, self-righteous tone. He invokes the Lord as a God who wishes not for peaceful lambs who follow his every word, but for wolves with sharp teeth who are willing to carry out his work.

Back in Africa, in a harrowing late-night scene where the LRA is setting fires and attacking the small safe-haven Sam has helped to build at which point the teachings of his former life comes in hand as he picks up arms and starts fighting back. In fact, since that time, Sam Childers has continued to fight back despite criticism of local freedom fighters who have since dismissed him from their movement altogether. He's played by that most dependable of recent physical actors, Gerard Butler (300, the Bounty Hunter) in a high-octane, headstrong performance that goes for broke. Michael Shannon is in top-form as usual as his heroine-addicted pal Donnie, and Michelle Monaghan equals Butler's intensity with her sharp and knowing performance as his wife Lynn.

But the performances don't make or break Machine Gun Preacher, it's the way the movie sees it's protagonist that matters and on that note, Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Monster's Ball, Quantum of Solace) renders a misfire here in a movie that at every step isn't sure about what it's trying to say. Todd Hertz, film critic at Christianity Today wrote, "Provocative, faith-affirming, and challenging, it models what Christian-made films could be. Childers' Christianity is shown as the dynamic and intricate force that it is." I couldn't disagree with him more. This film is not faith-affirming, in fact it is the opposite as it is a perversion of the tenets of Christianity by showing a man whose religious conversion is questionable at best. It is the nature of his spirituality that is called into question and that we simply can't ignore in this movie. It's problematic and troubling because Childers seems governed more by his own rage than by following God's words in th is narcissistic misadventure that leaves us with far more troubling questions than it ever wanted to deliver.

Machine Gun Preacher is a very confused and conflicted movie about a man who does not deserve to be celebrated or mythologized as a real-life Rambo.

**1/2 out of 4

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