Machine Gun Preacher is a performance in search of a movie. An ostensible bit of sweeping Oscar bait, the film has its eyes on glory and yet almost any and all positives to be found in this overlong, overdramatic, and overcooked biopic come from Gerard Butler's performance in the lead. As Sam Childers, a drug-addict ex-con who found Jesus and later became a kind of guerilla humanitarian in the Sudan, Butler works hard to distance himself from the kind of hammy goons he's best known for playing.
Childers eventually dedicated his life to opposing Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in the Sudan, both by building an orphanage in the war zone and actively undertaking missions to rescue children from their clutches. In Machine Gun Preacher, we're led to believe Childers skirted the line between charity and obsession, and Butler, to his credit, doesn't try to canonize a character who kills at random and all but leaves his family in the lurch for the sake of his cause. He plays Sam well as a loving father and husband, but doesn't skimp on the madness when Sam sells his business and funnels his family's savings to finance his mission as the Machine Gun Preacher who hunts and kills the LRA. He attacks the role with reverence and depth, and Machine Gun Preacher, if nothing else, gives him a chance to prove his mettle as an actor.
At its worst, though, Machine Gun Preacher as a movie that just isn't all that good. Director Marc Forster has a light touch when he wants to (Finding Neverland), but he goes for all-out melodrama on this one. Everything is all fire and brimstone, the movie works very hard to let you know it is an Important Story, but it's distant and cold in its superiority. It talks at the audience, not to it.
That said, Sam's scenes away from the Sudan have a kind of warmth to them, and Butler's chemistry with Michelle Monaghan (turning in a strong performance as Sam's wife) and Madeline Carroll (equally wonderful as the daughter) is palpable. The Sudan sections get a little trickier, though, since Forster does family dynamic well but has an iffy track record with action (see: Quantum of Solace). The filmmakers don't have to work too hard to get the audience's sympathies when depicting the LRA atrocities, but Forster is somehow always pushing too hard or not hard enough. He never breaches into the emotionally manipulative, to his credit, although he seems so wary of doing so that certain parts of the film (especially toward the end) should register more of an impact than they do.
Butler (who also produced) does his damndest to lift the movie up, and I'm inclined to say he succeeds to a degree. But he's one working part in an incredibly clunky whole. It's not just the heavy directing that does Machine Gun Preacher in, it's that the movie still feels just short of completion. The passage of time unfolds in an incredibly baffling manner; the plot seems to expand over several years, yet there's almost no telling where one turns into the other. The role of Sam's buddy Donnie (Michael Shannon) is either underwritten or too heavily edited; as a kind of surrogate father and husband during Sam's trips, it's easy to see how he might fit into the theme of the story or feed the conflict, but it goes almost entirely unexplored. The film puts more stock in Sam's lieutenant, Deng (Soulemayne Sy Savane) in the Sudan storyline, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does create a bit of an imbalance in the storytelling. The movie is also about twenty minutes too long.
But worst of all, there isn't a single moment of levity in the thing. Granted, Sam's story isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, but Hollywood has dealt with these sort of folk-hero stories before in, say, Schindler's List or Hotel Rwanda. Those films were serious, yes, but they had a lively, almost energetic feel to them that made them fun to watch; they could be entertaining as movies and still get the point of the story across. Machine Gun Preacher is more self-righteous posing as reverent. The comic relief bits are handled with the same kind of plodding Seriousness as the dramatic stuff. Forster clearly wanted to do Sam Childers's story justice but pushes so hard he turns it into a cliche, and he doesn't so much make the movie as direct traffic; the film unreels in such a mechanical, pre-determined way it should practically come with cue cards. Here's where you laugh; here's where you cry; submit your Oscar ballots at the end, and have a safe ride home.
