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Uplifting tale offsets weak 'Machine Gun Preacher' script

Uplifting tale offsets weak 'Machine Gun Preacher' script

Movie review

Go for the action, stay for the humanitarian.

Of course at the moment a profane Sam Childers asks his wife, "You quit stripping to pack mushrooms?" he doesn't seem anything like a do-gooder. Or a man who will turn his life around and upside down, build an orphanage in Africa and inspire a movie starring Gerard Butler.

But Mr. Childers, who lives roughly 90 miles from Pittsburgh in Central City, Somerset County, has done all of those things and more.

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That is one of the points of "Machine Gun Preacher," that charity can flower in the most unlikely places, even on a bus in Africa where a visitor maintains, "I ain't no city boy, I'm a hillbilly from Pennsylvania."

It also sheds light on suffering and atrocities in Africa and wants to inspire average movie-goers to walk out of the darkness into the light and ask, "What about me? What good have I done for the world today?"


'Machine Gun Preacher'

2 1/2 stars = Average
Ratings explained
  • Starring: Gerard Butler, Michelle Monaghan.
  • Rating: R for violent content, disturbing images, language, some drug use and a scene of sexuality.

"Machine Gun Preacher" opens in southern Sudan in 2003 with a glimpse of the horrific violence families face and then spins the timeline back a few years earlier to Pennsylvania as Mr. Childers is being released from prison.

It's important to see who he was to appreciate who he becomes and the movie does that. But it's a sometimes bumpy ride, despite an uplifting ending that includes the soulful song "The Keeper" by Chris Cornell and images of the real Pennsylvanian that may have you near tears.

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It compresses 30-plus years into a two-hour movie and skips among what director Marc Forster -- working with a screenplay by Jason Keller -- calls the catalysts or keystones of the story bound together with connective tissue.

Mr. Butler perfectly embodies the hard-living biker who channels his intensity into building and preaching at his own church and pouring his time, money and attention into saving children from being turned into soldiers and killers.

Much of this comes at the expense of his own daughter (played first by Ryann Campos and then Madeline Carroll) back home or his wife (Michelle Monaghan) who doesn't understand why he's sacrificing the thriving construction business he built from scratch.

"Machine Gun Preacher" has to cover a lot of territory, from the transformation of Mr. Childers to the wars and ethnic conflicts that shape his spiritual, physical and emotional background abroad and the challenges that await in Pennsylvania.

The R rating, for violent content, disturbing images, language, some drug use and a scene of sexuality, might turn off conservative moviegoers who want their faith-based stories a little tidier and no stronger than a PG-13.

But buried amid the noise, violence and Hollywood-ized, sometimes clunky, script is the story of a man who tries to do the right thing and watches it literally burn around him. "It's a test, Sam," Lynn tells him. "I can't do it no more," he suggests, as she tells him he must rebuild.

And as Sam preaches, God wants your backs, hands, blood and sweat. He's not interested in just good intentions.

First Published: October 7, 2011, 4:00 a.m.

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