Preacher man shoots blanks – and misses
THERE is no taking away from the fact that director Marc Forster ( Quantum of Solace, The Kite Runner, Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball) and awardwinning Scottish actor Gerard Butler are a force to be reckoned with. But their creative talent in Machine Gun Preacher isn’t enough to keep the fact-based story from misfiring.
As has been the case many times in the past, successful books often fall short of expectations when adapted for cinema. And as talented as Butler is, he falls short in bringing to life the inspirational story of Sam Childers, which has been penned in his book, Another Man’s War.
At the outset, Childers is introduced as an ex-con drug addict and an insufferable husband. When his wife Lynn (Monaghan) informs him that she quit her job at the strip club because “it ain’t right in the eyes of God”, he grows angry and storms out of the house, looking to score some drugs to calm him down.
His night of bingeing with fellow druggie Donnie (Shannon) ends on a bloody note when, in trying to give a lift to a hijacker, Childers ends up stabbing and leaving him for dead after he threatened Donnie’s safety.
This, the audience is led to believe, is the turning point in Childers’s life. While trying to wash the blood off himself, he breaks down and asks his wife for help. The next day he is off to church to be “saved” and decides to turn his life around.
And so begins his journey as he decides, amid starting his own construction business and taking care of his family and getting Donnie clean, to head out to East Africa to help repair the homes ruined by the civil war in Uganda.
While there he befriends Deng (Savane), a freedom fighter, and asks for a tour of war-ravaged Sudan. In witnessing the plight of Army to running out of funds to try to keep his church running while, at the same time, dealing with the cracks that are forming in his relationship with his wife and daughter.
As pointed out earlier, a talented cast does not a great movie make. Machine Gun Preacher is, at best, a rather disjointed effort. Just because viewers are force-fed Childers’s transformation does not mean it is a believable one at that.
Not to deride the real-life Childers’s contribution to the people of Sudan, but the “Hollywood-saves-africa-notion” as perpetuated by the adoption exploits of influential celebrities Angelina Jolie and Madonna, makes a mockery of the story, to some extent.
Although the objective is for Childers to redeem himself in the eyes of the viewer, I couldn’t empathise with his personal struggles, or sincerely applaud his efforts to make a difference in Africa.
This is one of those instances where truth is stranger than fiction – and I struggled to find the legitimacy in this cinematic interpretation of a real-life, albeit fallible hero.