Machine Gun Preacher

Rating: **1/2

A born-again white Christian,plus a reformed drug addict and drunkard,who comes to the rescue of children in civil war-torn Sudan is a story waiting to be told. And if he can both spout Jesus and shoot machine guns,Hollywood couldn’t have stayed away for too long.

Machine Gun Preacher is based on the real story of Pennsylvania-based Sam Childers who has been fighting for at least eight years to keep children safe in a civil war that has left more than 40,000 of them separated from their parents.

This was director Marc Forster’s (Finding Neverland) chance to show a part of the world that the rest has foresaken. Instead,our encounters are constricted to random shootouts at the end of which Childers (Butler) walks up to the site and sinks down,shaken by the horrors he sees. There is no attempt to understand or make us understand the contours of this conflict,only the horrors of it in broad details that anyway lie at the margins of our consciousness.

A likely argument is that this is Childers’ film. But one wishes it was more than about a white man coming to the rescue of the natives out of the goodness of his heart.

As his appeals for help go unheard back home,Childers loses his cool and his money. Butler does a good job of channelling that anger and frustration,but there is only so much one can see of a shaken and,then,a blazing Butler. How about a bit of the Jesus he claims to have seen? Do we really need to know more about the ways people are dying in Sudan than the small measures by which they can be saved? The film,in passing,gives us a hint: all of $5,000.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com