Review: 'Machine Gun Preacher' is uneven

Film: Machine Gun Preacher (A)
Director: Marc Forster
Cast: Gerard Butler, Michelle Monaghan, Michael Shannon, Madeline Carroll
Rating: ***
 
Sam Childers (Butler), who has just returned from jail, is quite the hardass. If his tattoo, weapons and boundless Harley Davidson accessories doesn’t prove it, he also frequents hazey bars, and goes on to berate his spouse Lynn (Monaghan) for no longer being a stripper as their doe-eyed daughter looks.

In fact, the shotgun-toting Pennsylvanian doesn’t stop short of sticking up the homes of drug dealers with his childhood buddy Donnie (Shannon). The reason, anyway, why his wife did give up stripping was that she found God, which Sam also does after a close call with Donnie.

After attending church, he soon finds himself on the other side of the pulpit and after a flash of inspiration, Sam heads to civil war-torn Sudan where he learns of the atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army headed by Joseph Kony. Realising his calling in life, Sam aids the South Sudanese cause by making his mission to found an orphanage to help save the children from the clutches of the LRA who have a penchant for abduction. Sam channels his inner wrath in the defence of the children, leading escapades that result in their retrieval. But as problems arise from sparse funding, Sam begins losing his faith and it becomes clearer day by day that his new role is undermining his relationship with his own family.

Gerard Butler, whose accent is in a perpetual state of flux from Scotsman to redneck, initially makes for a poor hellraiser with his caricatured performance. Eventually, however, grows into his role as he gains character, based on the real Sam Childers, gains maturity. Michelle Monaghan is great as Sam’s understated support system as is Carroll as the daughter who bears the brunt of Sam’s new found cause. Shannon, who isn’t playing an insane man, is comical and tragic as Donnie.

Machine Gun Preacher is an uneven film about a man who would seem inconsistent in his behaviour to some. While in the beginning, we had a long-drawn out story of his much too sudden conversion (how he overcame drug and alcohol addiction isn’t exactly explored), which was much to draggy and full of irrelevant bible thumping; on the other we have terse, heart-pumping action sequences in Africa. And it must be mentioned that the violence — most of which involves children — is quite stomach-turning.

The script should have ironed out these imbalances somehow. Maybe the film could have highlighted the character’s irony (having no qualms about being a follower of the prince of peace and pumping bullets in his victims, our character has no moral conflict as such) instead of rooting for him and justifying his rambunctious rambogiri. All in all, Machine Gun Preacher, while not a bad film, is an inessential one.