Saturday, March 10, 2012

REVIEW - Machine Gun Preacher

"True" story of Sam Childers, who is a former drug-dealer and general layabout who got religion, and became a crusader for Sudanese children forced to become soldiers.

It stars Gerard Butler, someone I rate very low in my league table of actors mainly because of his habit of playing stupid romantic comedies and/or generally superficial roles.

The film doesn't show how this murderer and rabble-rouser got Jesus. He just goes to Church, gets baptized, becomes a construction worker, sells his motorbike and hey presto, one convert.

In fact, the film is light on many of the details about what motivated Childers. All of a sudden we find him moved by a minister's account of how their "brothers" in Somalia need their help and he's upped and gone over there to rebuild homes. Then, he takes a visit to the war-torn north of the country and sees first-hand the true cost of civil war.

There's little to nothing said of how he funds the work he does in Sudan, the building of an orphanage, the constant travel back and forth between the USA and Sudan, how he manages to keep his home and family fed in America while he's away all the time.

In fact, it gets to the point where he needs money to continue funding the orphanage and he sells everything he's got at home, leaving his wife and daughter to live off whatever money she can collect from the church.

Eventually, the film portrays him as an unbalanced man, who still lives his life fighting with a gun, in Somalia.

The latest viral Kony graphic on the interwebs draws attention to the mass murderer Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army that Amnesty International estimates has killed 400,000 people in Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan.

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