Machine Gun Preacher (2011)

Machine Gun Preacher arrives with the full apparatus of the redemption narrative: a violent man, a baptism, a calling, a descent into obsession, and a closing act of grace. Gerard Butler plays Sam Childers, a Pennsylvania biker who finds God and then finds Sudan, where he builds an orphanage and takes up arms against Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army. Marc Forster directs with a straight face and a restless camera, which is the correct posture for material this sincere. The film believes in its subject completely, and that belief is the source of both its modest power and its trouble.

The Sudanese characters exist to be rescued, to die, or to instruct the protagonist about the condition of his own soul. They are granted dignity but not interiority, and the camera never leaves the white man at the center of the frame. The women in Childers' life are a wife who prays and a daughter who waits, and they occupy the screen only long enough to register as obligations. There is no racial analysis here, only atrocity as scenery. No queer presence, no environmental concern, no economic critique, no attention to bodies outside the conventional, no interest in minds that work differently. The sermonizing that does exist is Christian and humanitarian, delivered from a pulpit, and it belongs to an older tradition of moral instruction.

The cultural ledger, tallied honestly, comes up nearly bare. This is not a film that argues with its own era. It simply repeats the storytelling habits of an earlier one, where suffering abroad is raw material for a Westerner's spiritual education. The result is sincere, competent, and untouched by the progressive vocabulary that would later surround such stories. It wants to move us, and occasionally it does. It never once wants to challenge us, and that is the whole of the matter.