Movie Review:  Machine Gun Preacher

Never heard of this film?  Neither had I when I rented it.  Relativity Media lulled me in like one of those whores who pretends she’s not a whore until it’s too late and you’re $300 down and she’s one trick closer to her dreams coming true.

A brief shake-down on the plot, which is based on the true story of a drug-using bikie (Gerard Butler, Scottish guy from 300) who finds God somewhere in Pennsylvania and takes Him to Uganda to rescue a bunch of children from the clutches of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

The film opens with a chaotic scene in Africa, any country in Africa will do.  A village is burning to the ground, children are running about inefficiently and women are probably being raped.  

I could see where the director was going, and I tried to care, but if you’re going to dust off and repackage a classic “isn‘t it terrible over there” scene then you’d want to do better than a few wailing women and burning shacks.  Relativity Media please note we’re past 1999: viewers are desensitised to violence and more sensitive about low budgets.  I’m not saying people are getting smarter, stupidity is permanent, but I am suggesting if you can’t afford to make a movie, how about not making one?   Zombieland, Fast and Furious, Evan Almighty, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, Contraband (another of my favourites) to list but a few pearlers in an esteemed list of productions that stack chronologically on IMBD like a sick mongrel’s faecal expulsion, the last of which to be sprayed onto television screens throughout the Western world so that overweight white people can sit in their padded seats and pretend to feel sorry for Africans for an hour and twenty nine minutes.  

Gerard Butler fits awkwardly into the bad boy cliché: Harley Davidson singlet, queer tight leathers; the kind of bad guy your mum would hash up.  Butler struggles with an American accent throughout – in fact his only moments of acting plausibility is during those brief moments where he forgets his fumbling American facade and reverts to the mother tongue.  And let’s face it he’s the Scottish guy from 300.  His agent did him a massive disservice casting his first break-through film with a Scottish accent – it’s the quickest way to slap a glass roof on a young man’s acting career is to typecast him as British. 

Anyway, I can’t really comment on any other aspect of the film as I switched the bastard off after about 25 minutes.  I guess the intense empathy I had for the hero’s plight was too much for me.

1 star.