Rating: 5/5
With my new and first ever real job as a waitress at a bar and diner, it is becoming increasingly difficult to watch movies as I have a shift almost every night! I often come home to Mum and Dad half-way through watching a movie, most often a movie I have been dying to see for ages. So when I come home to find the 'rents in the middle of 'Machine Gun Preacher' I jumped up and down and flapped my hands like a spastic teenager after seeing a pair of lovely shoes on a shopping trip and exclaimed loudly several times how Gerard Butler was one of my favourite actors and how I was dying to see the movie.
Unfortunately last night I did not get to see Machine gun Preacher as the movie 'Death Race' had come on television, coincidentally starring my other favourite actor. However, this morning I did! I somehow got it into my mind that this movie would be a fictional hard core action with Gerard busting down doors and gunning all the bad men and taking revenge on all that is eeeevil. I wasn't too far off the point, but it is actually a true story, and not so much gunning down bad men with cheesy lines like in the Terminator, but more so the saving of many orphans' lives in Sudan, Africa, and building them hope and a chance at life.
I found this movie to be very intense, several times I almost cried at the horrific abuse, torture and pain that many suffered. I did however enjoy when payback was brought to some of those who inflicted the horrors whenever Sam Childers (Butler) picked up his guns and fought back. Sam Childers defended those children when no one else would, cried for them, felt their pain and then built them a sanctuary and fought tooth and nail to help them survive. His family back home were surprisingly very understanding for most of the film, Childers' wife Lynn encouraging him to carry on.
I enjoyed the movie as a whole, it was well constructed and always made sense/ was easy to follow. It was one of those movies where I wanted to jump in and help. I felt the urge to protect, to join in the fight for freedom. In some sense I think this is what pushed Sam Childers to help, although he did not live in the country he still wanted to fight for what was right. At the end of the movie I was left with the feeling of relief that someone was out there making a difference, and also with shock for how anyone in the world could so much as harm a child and not even show a flicker of remorse, and could keep on harming as if a switch somewhere inside had been turned off and forgotten.
