Butler's Cinema Scene

Gerard Butler in "Machine Gun Preacher"

“MACHINE GUN PREACHER” My rating: B (Opens wide on Oct. 7)

127 minutes | MPAA rating: R

God doesn’t need more sheep, impassioned lay preacher Sam Childers tells his small-town Pennsylvania congregation. He needs wolves, men and women willing to fight — physically fight — against Satan.

The evocatively titled “Machine Gun Preacher” (it sounds like a Roger Corman exploitation effort) is very much about the wolf lurking inside the most pious of us.

The story of the real-life Childers — a ex-con who found Jesus, created a mission for orphaned children in the civil war-torn Sudan and became a sort of vengeful freedom fighter against the depredations of guerilla leader Joseph Kony and his notorious Lord’s Resistance Army — is simultaneously inspiring and deeply disturbing.

And in the hands of director Marc Forster (“Finding Neverland,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Stranger than Fiction”) and star Gerard Butler (who redeems his recent history of gosh-awful rom-coms) it becomes one of the year’s most unusual and challenging films.

We first meet Sam (Butler) fresh out of prison; it takes about three minutes to declare him a bastard of the first order. This biker cannot wait to resume his life of drugs, drink and crime. He’s furious to learn that his wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan), who became a Christian during his incarceration, has given up her lucrative job in a strip club.

With his old drug buddy Donny (Michael Shannon), the furious Sam cuts a violent swatch that culminates with him repeatedly stabbing and leaving for dead a hitchhiker.

Apparently the enormity of his sins is too much; unable to live with himself, Sam begins attending services with Lynn, undergoes his own conversion, straightens his life out, starts a construction company and even builds his own church.

Up to this point “Machine Gun Preacher” plays like the best “Christian” movie ever, albeit one with a degree of profanity, violence, drug abuse and plain old bad attitude that more than earns it an R rating (be forewarned…despite its religious core, there’s stuff in this film that will deeply offend many churchgoers).

Michelle Monaghan

Inspired by a guest preacher who operates a school for orphans in Uganda,  Sam visits Africa and is outraged by the atrocities of the ongoing civil war. He’s particularly  horrified over the treatment of children, many of whom are unwillingly recruited into Kony’s LRS after being forced to murder their own parents.

After witnessing countless mutilations and deaths (depicted on screen in hair-raising detail), Sam announces it’s God’s will that he build his own school/orphanage in the Sudan. As a result of his humanitarian work and opposition to the LRS, Sam finds a price on his head.

And believing that the best defense is a good offense, he and a small group of opposition soldiers go after the most dangerous game available — the murderous LRS units that prey on defenseless villages.

Before long Sam becomes known as the Machine Gun Preacher.

Among the troubling questions posed by Jason Keller’s screenplay is that old perennial about the ends justifying the means. Sam is saving young lives, no doubt about that.

But you can’t go out day after day hunting your fellow man without the experience changing you in some profound way.

Is violence any more justifiable when it’s in God’s name and aimed at truly evil men?

Moreover, Sam’s obsession with his African mission leads to his near abandonment of his wife, his teenage daughter (Madeline Carroll) and his old friend Donny, who without Sam’s mentoring  is slipping back into drug addiction.

“Machine Gun Preacher” ends somewhat arbitrarily. Having introduced this perplexing conundrum, the film never attempts to resolve it. We’re told that Sam Childers is still running his orphanage and fighting the LRS; the closing credits unfold over photos and home movies of the real Sam Childers preaching, commingling with his orphans and blowing apart targets with a pump-action shotgun.

“Preacher” treats its God-fearing subjects with a refreshing matter of factness. It passes no judgment on religious individuals, never satirizes them. In that regard it feels absolutely authentic.

Hollywood rarely gets religion right. It does this time around.

Another revelation is Butler. Gone is the flabby Pillsbury Doughboy physique and lazy acting that was starting to make him a parody of himself. Here he’s as cut as Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and overflowing with emotional rawness and immediacy.

His Sam Childers evokes both admiration and fear, without ever demanding to be liked. That’s something rare in a movie hero.

And “Machine Gun Preacher” never tells us what we’re supposed to think of Sam. It lets us make up our own minds. That’s something rare in the movies.

| Robert W. Butler