Sam Childers is a real-time hero. But he was a bad guy, and was in a jail, but one day he becomes a hero, and he just not become man of word, but man of action. The place where everybody is goon, bad guys, everybody owns rifles, and machine guns, then you cannot do your own good thing by just preaching words, but you have to hold a rifle, a machine gun to show them your determination, and to stand tall to protect and do the good thing what you want to do, and Sam Childers was that guy.
Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) comes out of the prison, he just don’t have any direction in his life, but finds that his wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) has left her job of stripper and instead find god, and she along with her daughter Paige(Madeline Carroll). One fine night, after taking drugs, Sam and his fast friend Donnie (Michael Shannon) was going somewhere in their car, in anger Sam killed a vagrant, but later he repented killing him, and then on request of his wife, he went to church to listen to inspiring messages of the church, and that day he changes himself. He found out about Uganda/Sudan, about the civil war going on there, where the LRA not only killed innocent people, but abducted many small children to use them as selling products in many markets. He took the responsibility of taking care of those innocent children by not only building an orphanage in northern Sudan in mid of a war zone, but also fight the LRA with the help of his new friend Deng (Souleymane Sy Savane), who is also a soldier of SPLA army, other soldiers of SPLA, and his own machine-gun. He went to attack LRA convoys, and rescue many children from their hold. He is still doing that work.
Gerard Butler is a versatile actor, who did different kinds of roles, and yet underestimated. If you have seen "300" you must know that he was the perfect choice for the lead role and here too he looks perfect for the role, which indeed he did it beautifully, but other reason was he matched the original ’Sam Childers’, with the look he was given. Other mentionable roles were done by Souleymane & Michael, they lived their characters like true originals. The movie is 2 hrs long, and I watched it in one sitting, that’s the beauty of this movie, it not only shows a good story, a good message, but shows behavioral aspects of the characters, wonderfully depicted the mindsets and tensions of them, we as an audience, can feel what they’re going through, emotions are touched, felt for them, and then there are some scenes of brutally killed innocent children, make you feel cry for them. Wonderfully presented and emotionally touched movie is directed by Marc Forster, who has also directed other nice movies like ’The Kite Runner’, ’Quantum of Solace’, ’World War Z’ and 7 Oscar nominated ’Finding Neverland’. Direction is too good here. Background score is matched to the setting, and yes setup is nice, I think in the movie some scenes are definitely shot up at real locations with real time characters, in the end we also saw the footage of all real-time characters including Sam Childers and Deng.
Sam Childers known as ’The White Preacher’ aka ’Machine Gun Preacher’ has done something which many guys can only just tell or claim or wanted to do, but never did anything, and he accomplished that, and as the last line of the movie which is spoken by real Sam Childers, which is written below in the end of review summarize the movie and the MAN himself. This movie is based on Childer’s book ’Another Man’s War’ and is a biopic on him. Though movie is panned by critics, but ask me, you should not miss this movie, this movie was released in 2011, and if you’ve missed it, either you bring the DVD or can watch if coming on TV. I rate it as 4.5/5.
GRuchirG.
"For me to sit here and give all kind of excuses to make it right, I can’t do. But what I wanna ask everyone out there, everyone that has a child, everyone that has a brother or a sister, if your child or your family member was abducted today, if a madman came in, a terrorist came in, abducted your family member, or your child and if I said to you "I can bring your child home, " does it matter how I bring him home?"
NO SIR.