Machine Gun Preacher (2011)

Very Cool!!!

Better Late Then Never

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

The movie everyone needed to see. Its not just gonna make you cry it is going to leave a question in your heart. What kind of life your living now. Hope and love the things a man should not leave at any cost. Eventough everything is down hope and love is always going to male everything cool at the end of the game.

Pennsylvanian biker Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) gets out of prison to find his wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) as a born again Christian. She had quit stripping and drugs. Sam is angry and refuses to join until one harrowing night. He joins her church. After a close call with a tornado, he starts his own construction company. He goes to Uganda to do missionary work and discovers a horrific war in South Sudan. Joseph Kony is the ruthless leader of the Lord's Resistance Army. Sam sets up a missionary in the war zone saving children from death, slavers, and conscription.I really like Sam's journey to find religion. It's a very standard Christian film story but it's done very well. The second half has him going back and forth between Africa and America. It does disrupt the flow of the story. There are bits of compelling scenes but the disjointed nature does take its toll. The final ending is not climatic enough. The entire second half needs a certain literary license to configure a more compelling flow. The tension isn't built up properly. Overall, I like Gerard Butler, the standard formula of the first half, and bits of the second half.

Machine Gun Preacher is a good, but very flawed movie. It is fairly accurate, with less historical inaccuracies than you'll find in most Hollywood movies. Most importantly, it accurately shows the horror of violence, and shows how even Sam Childers has his morality thrown off by the violence that he engages in.The movie does use a lot of stereotypes and doesn't represent the wide spectrum of people and places. It primarily takes place in two locations - rural western Pennsylvania and rural Africa in the Northern Uganda/Southern Sudan regions. Its depictions of these areas are accurate, but if you take them to be representative of all Americans, of all Christians, of all areas of Sudan and Uganda, etc. then it is inaccurate. Not all areas of America are like western Pennsylvania, but this was a reasonably accurate depiction of western Pennsylvania. Not all Christians are the way that they are portrayed in this film, but this film did accurately represent the specific slice of Christians that it intended to. Not all of Uganda and Sudan are countryside with small villages and old cars. The urban areas of these countries are far more advanced than the countryside. Yet this movie didn't take place in the urban areas. An American could easily be misled by this movie into having an inaccurate view of what Uganda and Sudan are like because of the lack of any urban scenes in Africa, or scenes showing how Africa isn't all just small villages in the desert. Similarly, anyone that doesn't actually know Christians could be misled by this movie into having an inaccurate view of what Christians are like because of its portrayal of Christians as those who get baptized on a whim and get a messiah complex when faced with evil.This movie isn't for those who are trying to learn history or culture. I sincerely hope that anyone watching this movie realizes that it portrays a small slice of the cultures, and that it is not representative of the entire cultures. However, I know how such a huge portion of moviegoers are ignorant of history and culture, and that they'll become even more ignorant and uninformed because of this movie. This movie isn't suited for the uninformed audience. If the moviegoer doesn't know about Joseph Kony and the LRA before watching this movie, I shudder at what this will do to them. I'll repeat myself because this is so important: this movie is not for those who are ignorant or history and culture.As a Christian pacifist, I was very disturbed by the way that Christians were portrayed in this film, but I also understand American Christian culture well enough to know that this depiction was an accurate depiction of the dominant Christian culture in white rural America in the western Pennsylvania region. The fault lies not with the director, but with the Christians of this country. I am very grateful that the director showed how Sam Childers' trust in violence caused him to neglect his family, to lose the trust of his men in Africa, and to start down the same path that Joseph Kony took. This was best represented by the scene where Sam Childers gave a sermon where he claimed that God doesn't want sheep, he wants wolves. This is an abomination, this is a heresy, and this is offensive to God. Yet this is not an inaccurate way to describe American Christian culture. And no Christians stood up to him and shared the gospel with him when he was very visibly living a heretical life, trusting in violence. And this is also an accurate account of how Christians in our country act. The movie did have minor inaccuracies, such as its oversimplification of the political conflict in southern Sudan (the stereotypical violent Muslims against non-violent Christians propaganda), and in its depiction of Lynn Childers as a young beautiful wife (Hollywood almost always makes the hero characters much more attractive than they actually are, even in movies like a Beautiful Mind or The Imitation Game). But these did not change the fact that the general tone of the movie is a reasonably honest depiction of the various subjects in the movie. I sincerely hope that any moviegoer realizes that this is a fictionalized account, and that they seek truth from news organizations and factual accounts, rather than from a Hollywood action/drama movie. I'm realistic (and cynical) enough to know that in most situations, moviegoers will not take this extra step to find out the actual truth.This was a good movie, but I plead with all those who watch it to seek out the truth. This was an honest enough depiction of the horrors of war to not offend a pacifist like me, and to be a movie that I enjoyed. But this movie is a Hollywood version of the truth, it is not the actual truth. Please let this movie inspire you to seek out the truth, and to not just be content with the story this movie presents.

Well, this movie did well in the beginning while introducing Sam Childers. He was a complete chauvinist and violent guy who notably had a mental disorder, and his family had to deal with him everyday. After some while, Childers decides going to church and traveling to Africa in order to help the poor people that live there. The problem is that, as the story goes, we're able to notice that Butler's character believes to be a hero, even if it means killing lots of people because there is a war going on. It is interesting to remember that Hitler, and several other totalitarian presidents, began their career as "the world savers", growing their popularity until the horror began. It's very known that power corrupts men, and this movie mixes this subject with a predisposition that Childers always had. I mean, he always seemed to be an explosive guy that needed no reason to beat people up, so it was almost obvious to imagine he'd become something like that. The problem of this film is that... there is nobody to spectator feel identified with. The characters' lack of charisma let this movie a little boring, mainly if the audience doesn't enjoy religious advertisement. In my opinion, "Machine Gun Preacher" is just a regular film that entertains for some moments, but never delivers. We've seen better....