Happy Catholic is reviewing a flick I’m puttin’ on my gotta see list:
When I hear people pushing inspirational Christian movies, I instinctively duck. This usually means sweet, earnest stories where nice little speeches tell us everything that everyone feels, and how God “spoke” to them. Inevitably, I have to surrender skilled storytelling just to get a Christian message.
So, my ears perked up when I was warned about Machine Gun Preacher and its “R” rating (for disturbing images, violence, language, drug use, and a scene of sexuality) and how it packed considerable Hollywood firepower in the form of stars Gerard Butler (300), Michelle Monaghan (Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang) and Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), and was directed by Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace, Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner).
Machine Gun Preacher ain’t your mama’s Christian movie. In fact, it ain’t a lot of Christians’ idea of an inspirational movie. But it should be. It isn’t afraid to show us the afflicted children of the Sudan, in contrast to our comfortable lives, and leave us shaken.
Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) is an extremely violent heroin addict and drug dealer — and completely self-serving as we discover early in the film when he castigates his wife for leaving her stripping job because she has become Christian. Eventually Childers, too, becomes Christian and begins supporting himself as a carpenter. He takes a guest preacher’s words to heart and goes to the Sudan to help missionaries with construction work.
It is there that he comes face to face with the brutal violence the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rains upon the people: burning villages, selling children into the sex trade, and forcing boys to become soldiers. Childers builds an orphanage and, when he finds it repeatedly under LRA attack, eventually goes on the offensive.
The story doesn’t just tease a single strand, however. Childers’ dependence upon his family is a key element of the story, as is (in his passion to help the African orphans) his occasional neglect. His wife’s unwavering support makes him pick himself up and keep trying, even when, later in the film, she must remind him that he is “all we’ve got here.”
Christianity is key to this story and it is depicts an interesting combination of small church, evangelical worship and the mysterious, transforming force that shakes believers to their core. It is the encounter with Christ that leaves the believer often unable to explain what has happened, but infused with the passion to give one’s all.
Yet the movie doesn’t preach. It shows us Childers’ life and experience, but encounters with God are his own, and the audience may ponder them later.
Some viewers may be troubled when Childers roars, “God don’t want sheep! He wants wolves with teeth.” It’s a message that works at the time it is uttered, but when Childers hits a downward spiral we are left to wonder whether that is really what God wants. The answer, I believe, is given in a scene of determined hope; we see Childers standing like a shepherd, amid a flock of rescued children. No image in this film is accidental and this one, above all, is one that must be taken to heart.
She’s got more… read the whole thing and look for it in a theatre near you.
