Cast: Gerard Butler, Michelle Monaghan, Kathy Baker, Madeline Carroll, Michael Shannon

Director: Marc Forster

Rating: 2.5 / 5

The film unreels in a mechanical, pre-determined way ... It's not just the heavy directing that eventually flops Machine Gun Preacher ... but the fact that the movie feels somehow incomplete.

Machine Gun Preacher appears to be overlong, overdramatic, and an overcooked biopic, where the few positives that can be found only come from Gerard Butler's performance in the lead.

In movie terms, Machine Gun Preacher’s story is too true to be good.

Directed by Marc Forster and starring Gerard Butler, it illustrates some of the ways that a terrific story can turn into a bad film despite the best intentions of everyone involved.

The script, written by Jason Keller, lurches and wanders, and the filmmakers seem absolutely puzzled and confused by its ethical and political complexities, unable to reconcile the two poles of their hero’s personality.

Clearly, the plot had some potential, but Forster and screenwriter Jason Keller have fallen into the ages-old trap of "staying true to the material" and therefore sabotaging both the movie's narrative and thematic possibilities.

The passage of time unfolds in an incredibly baffling manner; the plot seems to expand over several years, yet there's almost no telling where one turns into the other.

The role of Sam's buddy Donnie (Michael Shannon) is either underwritten or too heavily edited; as a kind of surrogate father and husband during Sam's trips, it's easy to see how he might fit into the theme of the story or feed the conflict, but it goes almost entirely unexplored.

The film puts more stock in Sam's lieutenant, Deng (Soulemayne Sy Savane) in the Sudan storyline, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does create a bit of an imbalance in the storytelling. The movie is also about twenty minutes too long.

Much of the drama that takes place in Pennsylvania seems forced and manipulative and because of that, the sections in Africa are infinitely more watchable more for the landscape than the story, because this is when the film frequently devolves into gunfights and explosions as Butler transforms himself into a modern-day Schwarzenegger.

The film unreels in a mechanical, pre-determined way and It's not just the heavy directing that eventually flops Machine Gun Preacher , but the fact that the movie feels somehow incomplete.

Machine Gun Preacher’s story is definitely one worth telling, it's just not handled in a particularly effective way here, and considering how many strong films Forster has made, this one is surprisingly unimpressive and disappointing.