Title: Machine Gun Preacher

Starring: Gerard Butler, Michelle Monaghan, Michael Shannon, Souleymane Sy Savane, Madeline Carroll

Can faulty filmmaking kill the message and/or spirit of a movie? After seeing Machine Gun Preacher…the answer is yes & no.

While the product gets its point across, the delivery and execution behind-the-lens makes it tough to want to hear out this tale that has a unique attraction; for what the audience take-in on screen is still happening today. It’s just a shame the cinematic storytelling is not worthy of the subject matter it is depicting.

Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) is an in-and-out of jail motorcycle drug addict who has more sins than the average human. And he has a sweet mullet, to boot. After his latest heinous act, he returns to his trailer park home and begs his wife, Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) to help him. She instructs him to find God – as she did when she stopped dancing on the pole – and with a little effort, the tough guy begins to reform. He lands a job doing construction and is also putting more time in raising their daughter, Paige (Madeline Carroll).

While attending church, Sam learns about the morbid crimes against children by a group called the Lord’s Resistance Army in South Africa. Despite starting his own construction company and moving his family into a new home, he immediately feels the need to get over to the area and meet these tortures and murderers head-on all while trying to build a community center in the middle of the Sudan. As the years briskly go by, Sam is spending all his time, and directly giving up everything, to raise money to protect the rescued children – which he saved with the freedom fighters using guerilla warfare tactics. Problem is, the LRA’s keep coming with a vengeance.

This biographical film has its heart in the right place but the filmmakers struggled to convey a cinematic telling. Gerard Butler is excellent as Sam Childers but the flow of the screenplay can make one question his character’s actions. Things are moving too quick here and the respective scenes are more-or-less cliff notes. If you’re going to make a movie about a lauded man – who the African kids refer to as the “White Preacher” – one needs to have a better plan of attack. All they’re (filmmakers) doing is here is giving a gut-wrenching flavoring of Childers’ crusade overseas. We get a few tasty licks, yet the whole product is scattered all over the place; making the timeline difficult to connect to. The graphic nature will conjure up emotions as one sees piles of kids being burned along with deadly machine gun battles that ensue every twenty minutes or so. However, these are just bullet points that should have been reserved for a documentary…not a full-length feature.

While all the performers are believable – and the Hollywood scripting seems toned down here – the pacing of this depiction is a letdown. Still, about halfway through one accepts the below-average storytelling as the heartfelt shots of the tortured kids along with Sam dealing with his frustrated family on rare back-home visits, will get you feeling something. Knowing that this stuff is actually going on can mend the randomness of how scenes are pieced together and not obliterate the experience.

Overall, Machine Gun Preacher has violence trading off with certain sequences which can tug at the heart strings. But do understand that there is barely a shred of anything masquerading as a piece of cohesive storytelling with regards to the mechanics. Sam Childers deserves better than this even though the obvious message and/or purpose gets across. At the very least, this is a tolerable religion/spiritual genre picture people can embrace no matter what their background.

Technical: D

Overal: C

Review by Joe Belcastro