Here's a different kind of action film. Gerard Butler plays Sam Childers, a real life preacher who rescued children in war-torn Sudan.
The film opens with Childers' release from prison, he immediately returns to his outlaw biker lifestyle, drinking and doing drugs, committing armed robbery and other crimes, until he reaches out to Lynn, his born-again girlfriend for help. She takes him to be baptized in her church. Soon, he is on the straight-and-narrow, and goes from day laborer to owning his own construction company and building a family with Lynn.
One day Sam decides to join a church mission to Uganda, where he befriends soldiers of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, and convinces them to take him north into Sudan. What he witnesses there profoundly affects him and he creates his own ministry in the U.S. and builds an orphanage in Sudan, fighting off two different invading armies simultaneously.
One of the great things about Machine Gun Preacher is that it doesn't whitewash or sanitize Childers. He's shown as a drug abuser, single-minded, unsympathetic to others points of view, a dangerous criminal, an abusive husband and an absentee father among other things, but he's also shown as a man of tremendous compassion, a strong if selective moral code, and a loyal and courageous altruist.
Childers' actions and methods are hugely controversial, both among Christians and humanitarians in general, but it is his unwillingness to wait on talking heads and diplomats to put an end to genocide, and his willingness to kill to protect the defenseless that makes Machine Gun Preacher so compelling.
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