“Help me.” When Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) looks up at his wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) at this moment, he’s got blood all over him and a very bad reason for it. Specifically, this just-paroled convict and drug addict has stabbed a man who tried to rob him, then left him by the side of the road. Lynn doesn’t know that immediate backstory, but she’s relieved to see Sam in this wretched state. Because she’s got the answer.
In the next scene, Lynn—who found God and gave up her job as a stripper while Sam was in prison—has her husband dressed in a shirt and tie, headed to church, along with their daughter Paige (Ryann Campos) and his mother (Kathy Baker). When the preacher calls for repentant sinners to announce themselves, Sam balks, for a minute, and then he goes—all in.
After his baptism, it’s only a matter of minutes in Machine Gun Preacher, the movie based on this real-life convert’s exploits, before he’s started a successful construction company and built a church in his hometown in rural Pennsylvania, where he discovers another gift by accident (when a scheduled speaker doesn’t show up), a capacity to move people with his preaching. A few scenes later, Sam’s in Sudan on a relief mission, whereupon he decides he must also apply his construction skills—literal and metaphorical—to save the children there.
Suffice it to say that Sam feels called. He also feels, by turns, confused and driven, distraught and irate. But even if this makes him sound like a compelling and even complicated movie character, he is, in Machine Gun Preacher, repeatedly reduced to easier pieces. As Sam fights with his family, rejects his friends, and kills the Sudanese soldiers who regularly leave children orphans and then turn them into conscript killers, he also grapples with his own guilt, over his own victims, from his past life, as well as the African victims he’s unable to rescue now. Sam frets and rages, he turns again and again to violence as a means to grapple with his demons. And the movie—large and unwieldy and strange—makes him a hero, a white gun with big guns. Or, as he puts it, a “hillbilly from Pennsylvania.”
That his heroism is set in Sudan, where he’s repeatedly surrounded by frightened black children and freedom fighters looking for organization, is only the first problem in Machine Gun Preacher. The movie does allow that Sam has some issues at home: though Lynn supports the missionizing and even admires his gun-toting, she also worries that he’s leaving her to look after the congregation at home and also neglecting Paige. For her part, the teenaged Paige (Madeline Carroll) is increasingly resentful that dad’s never home, though she acts out tearfully rather than in the more outrageous ways you might expect from the daughter of a one-time rebel and consistent bully like Sam. Instead, she embodies Sam’s generic domestic stake, and in this. Paige takes after her mother and grandmother, all props to illustrate Sam’s dilemma.
myFOXDetroit.com Staff - We have the real story about a biker who became a machine gun carrying preacher in the name of God to save kids in the Sudan.
It might sound crazy but it's Sam Childer's life. Now, it's also a movie starring Gerald Butler. It was partially filmed in Detroit.
Machine Gun Preacher is rated R and opens on Friday.
Fox 2's Lee Thomas sat down with Childers to hear his take on the new flick.
In the next scene, Lynn—who found God and gave up her job as a stripper while Sam was in prison—has her husband dressed in a shirt and tie, headed to church, along with their daughter Paige (Ryann Campos) and his mother (Kathy Baker). When the preacher calls for repentant sinners to announce themselves, Sam balks, for a minute, and then he goes—all in.
After his baptism, it’s only a matter of minutes in Machine Gun Preacher, the movie based on this real-life convert’s exploits, before he’s started a successful construction company and built a church in his hometown in rural Pennsylvania, where he discovers another gift by accident (when a scheduled speaker doesn’t show up), a capacity to move people with his preaching. A few scenes later, Sam’s in Sudan on a relief mission, whereupon he decides he must also apply his construction skills—literal and metaphorical—to save the children there.
Suffice it to say that Sam feels called. He also feels, by turns, confused and driven, distraught and irate. But even if this makes him sound like a compelling and even complicated movie character, he is, in Machine Gun Preacher, repeatedly reduced to easier pieces. As Sam fights with his family, rejects his friends, and kills the Sudanese soldiers who regularly leave children orphans and then turn them into conscript killers, he also grapples with his own guilt, over his own victims, from his past life, as well as the African victims he’s unable to rescue now. Sam frets and rages, he turns again and again to violence as a means to grapple with his demons. And the movie—large and unwieldy and strange—makes him a hero, a white gun with big guns. Or, as he puts it, a “hillbilly from Pennsylvania.”
That his heroism is set in Sudan, where he’s repeatedly surrounded by frightened black children and freedom fighters looking for organization, is only the first problem in Machine Gun Preacher. The movie does allow that Sam has some issues at home: though Lynn supports the missionizing and even admires his gun-toting, she also worries that he’s leaving her to look after the congregation at home and also neglecting Paige. For her part, the teenaged Paige (Madeline Carroll) is increasingly resentful that dad’s never home, though she acts out tearfully rather than in the more outrageous ways you might expect from the daughter of a one-time rebel and consistent bully like Sam. Instead, she embodies Sam’s generic domestic stake, and in this. Paige takes after her mother and grandmother, all props to illustrate Sam’s dilemma.
myFOXDetroit.com Staff - We have the real story about a biker who became a machine gun carrying preacher in the name of God to save kids in the Sudan.
It might sound crazy but it's Sam Childer's life. Now, it's also a movie starring Gerald Butler. It was partially filmed in Detroit.
Machine Gun Preacher is rated R and opens on Friday.
Fox 2's Lee Thomas sat down with Childers to hear his take on the new flick.
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