I rented out Machine Gun Preacher thinking it would be a gritty action flick. You know, Gerard Butler-style action, fist fights and a triumphant ending.
I spent at least half an hour welling up while watching.
Machine Gun preacher is based on the life of Sam Childers , a drug addicted biker who has just finished serving a prison sentence and returns home to find that his wife has given up her stripper job after she began attending the local church. Frustrated at this reduction in income, in his first days out of prison, Sam returns to his old ways, until in a drug-induced rage he repeatedly stabs a hitch-hiker. He returns home sober to wash the blood off his shirt and realizes the need to be saved.
What follows is a beautiful telling of how Sam’s life is converted and how he takes up honest jobs to eventually founding his own construction company after a storm wrecks the townships around his. The direction and story telling is flawless and even though you’re expecting Gerard Butler to be blowing things up, you can’t help but be drawn into his perfect portrayal of a changed man. I particularly liked this scene where he returns home late one night and his wife looks to his arms for tell-tale drug injection puncture wounds and finds punctures… but Sam tells her he donated blood and puts a crumpled 20 dollar bill on the table! Touching!
At one church event, Sam hears about the struggles of the people in Sudan and of the human atrocities of the LRA. Galvanized into saving his own soul, Sam flies down to Sudan and witnesses first hand the effect of landmines. He returns to the US a haunted man and then decides he must go back to Sudan to build a church and an orphanage. Using funds that he gets from his ministry in Pennsylvania and scrounging funds from banks and friends, Sam begins his mission.
From that point onward we’re thrust into Sam’s struggles with the LRA and eventually with himself as he begins to lose faith and hope in the mission. And then, how he redeems himself when one of the orphan boys talks to him about consuming hate…and comes to terms with his capabilities and his responsibilities toward the 200 orphaned children and his own biological family back in the USA.
Gerard Butler has done a fantastic job as Sam Childers and we see his metamorphosis from a crack addict to a man who accepts he is at fault and needs redemption and then his relentless drive to do something good in the world. The film captures the graphic violence in Sudan and makes us realize how easy we have things here… a child forced to kill his own murder, another being blown to bits in a land mine, others being burnt by the roadside as they wait for Sam Childers to return.
It’s a look into how depraved the human race can get and how there are people who firmly believe in their battles against the system strong enough to let it consume them and drive them, irrespective of what the world thinks of them.
Machine Gun Preacher is based on the book Another Man’s War: The True Story of One Man’s Battle to Save Children in the Sudan – Sam Childers
