Philip French 

Machine Gun Preacher – review

It's rousing stuff, writes Philip French, but this tale of real-life missionary in Uganda might have been best as a documentary
  
  

gerard butler sam childers
The Kalashnikov and the cross: Gerard Butler is the Machine Gun Preacher. Photograph: Phil Bray Photograph: Phil Bray/PR

The eponymous Kalashnikov Bible-thumper is Sam Childers (Gerard Butler), a Pennsylvanian backwoodsman, Hell's Angel, drug addict and criminal who finds God and, inspired by a missionary's sermon, goes out to Uganda to build homes for local orphans and kill terrorists. It's rabble-rousing material, and the final credits, in which we see footage of the real Childers strutting his unedifying stuff, suggest that a documentary would have been the appropriate genre.

 

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