Machine Gun Preacher

Sam Childers was a drug-dealing biker from Pennsylvania before prison, sobriety and a pulpit rearranged his life. Marc Forster's film follows him to Sudan, where building a church turns into something else entirely: an armed campaign to take back children abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army. Gerard Butler plays the contradiction rather than smoothing it over, and the distance between the man preaching and the man pulling the trigger is the actual subject. Commercially it was a wipeout. Against a 30 million dollar budget it took roughly 3.3 million worldwide, about a tenth of what it cost, and reviews were mixed at best. The film's one real virtue is that it declines to acquit its hero. Childers' violence in Africa is never automatically laundered by the number of children he saves. Who it is for: viewers curious about the moment good intentions curdle into force, and anyone who wants Butler outside pure action mode. Who it is not for: anyone with no patience for the white saviour framework. The film leaves a door open to that criticism without walking through it itself.