Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) was a drug-dealing ex-con who found God after he seemingly hit rock bottom. As a result he established a church in his hometown and, as fate would have it, made his way to East Africa. There he would eventually set up the Angels of East Africa rescue organization where he rescued hundreds of orphaned children and established his own militia to help fight against Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Machine Gun Preacher adopts Childers’ nickname and sets out to tell his story in what ends up being an emotionally impactful, somewhat manipulative and quite scattered movie. If I sound conflicted… I am.
My gut reaction was to be far more interested in the man the film was about rather than the film itself. A brief search online tells me several of the film’s establishing moments aren’t entirely true and the way this savage ex-con goes from stabbing a man damn near 50 times to becoming a man in search of being reformed is like a switch being turned on. Is that how it works? One minute you’re ready to kill and the next you’re ready to grasp onto that which you laughed at only a couple scenes earlier?
Everything about the film’s setup seems rushed and made up. It may have been better if director Marc Forster had just done a Power Point presentation to establish his character and then get into the meat of the story he wished to tell as Childers makes his way across the Atlantic.
Attempting to tell all stories at once and frequently going into traditional storytelling elements, Machine Gun Preacher bounces back and forth between Sam’s plight in East Africa, to his wife (Michelle Monahan) and daughter (Madeline Carroll) back home and the cliched and entirely unnecessary story of his drug-addict friend (Michael Shannon). Of the three stories the only one that feels at all authentic is Sam’s time in Africa and the way screenwriter Jason Keller chose to tell the story here is a bit curious.
The unforgivable acts seen on screen are heart-wrenching as a young boy is forced to kill his own mother, another is killed by a hidden land mine and more find their demise in other horrible ways. So it goes without saying that you’ll be moved when you see the effort put forth by Childers as he takes on their struggle as his own. The biggest problem I had, though, is when the audience is made to witness one terrible act of violence on a group of children only to prove a point at the end of the film. Let’s just say, you won’t expect Sam to ever leave a group of 20 or so children alone in the desert in the middle of the night ever again, but maybe that calls into question… Why would he ever do so in the first place? To prove a point silly.
I also found my interest deteriorating as Childers’ grip on reality became increasingly strained, but not because I didn’t believe it could happen, I just didn’t believe it was happening to the character I was watching on screen. Making matters worse, each plot twist is foreshadowed to the point I could name three right now if I wanted to ruin everything for you. The writing is on the wall when it comes to this film, Forster didn’t need to include additional expository scenes and/or dialogue to make sure the point is hammered home and he certainly didn’t need to do it before each scene happened making the climax of each moment an inevitability rather than a guy punch dose of reality.
Playing Childers, it’s a bit tough to tell just how well Gerard Butler has done considering the film’s editing and choppy narrative doesn’t do him any favors. The film opens in such a way as to make us believe this man is hell on wheels so when the narrative instantly shifts to him becoming a baptized, Bible-thumping hard rock man of God it’s a bit of a jolt and his character’s trajectory doesn’t end there.
A scene where Childers returns home from Africa and begins preaching to his congregation as if he’s a crazed lunatic was the moment the film almost fell completely off the rails, and yet scenes involving his impassioned plea for money to help his cause and the subsequent hypocrisy he endures shortly thereafter are absolutely spot on. That scene is one of several that still managed to hit home as this film is more of a hodgepodge of good and bad rather than an all out failure.
When it comes to the work of Marc Forster I find him to be a definite hit or miss director. I am one of the few that really liked his James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, and I enjoyed both Finding Neverland and The Kite Runner. However, Monsters Ball I will never watch again, Stay is a mess and Stranger than Fiction was a “middler”. Machine Gun Preacher falls into that middle ground for me as well. It’s definitely not a well made film, but the takeaway from Childers’ efforts is inspiring.
For the most part Machine Gun Preacher plays like one big conflict, both the story and the movie itself. Moving from scene-to-scene I never felt as if I was inside the head of Sam Childers and just when you think you’re getting a grip on who he is, the film dials it back or ramps it up, and not in a way that keeps you on your toes but in a way that makes you wonder if there was ever a clear idea of just what they were trying to do.
