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Machine Gun Preacher
The true story of Sam Childers, a former drug-dealing biker who finds God and became a crusader for hundreds of Sudanese children who've been kidnapped and pressed into duty as soldiers.
2011 · Directed by Marc Forster · 129 min · Action · Thriller · Crime · Screenplay in the scene database · 7 frames
Tagline
Hope is the greatest weapon of all
Plot
In 2003 in southern Sudan, the LRA attacks a village and forces a young boy to kill his mother.
A few years earlier, Sam Childers, an alcoholic drug-using biker from Pennsylvania, is released from prison and finds that his wife, Lynn, has given up her job as a stripper after accepting Christ as her savior. Dumbfounded by her decision, he returns to a life of crime and partying and doing heroin with his friend Donnie, and one night he almost kills a vagrant. Shaken by the experience, Sam goes to church with Lynn, where he is baptized and offered salvation.
With a new outlook on life, Sam is able to find a stable job as a construction worker and later starts his own company. He helps Donnie get sober and goes on a missionary trip to Uganda to build homes for refugees. While there, he asks Deng, one of the SPLA soldiers watching over his group, to take him north to see Sudan, despite Deng warning him that it is a war zone. In a medical tent, Sam is asked by a female doctor to help move a woman who has just had her lips cut off by Joseph Kony's LRA rebels. That night, Sam witnesses the large numbers of children who come from their villages to sleep outdoors on the ground at the displaced persons camp because it is safer than staying at home, and Sam brings as many as will fit into his and Deng's room to sleep. The next day, Deng takes Sam to a village that was attacked by the LRA, and Sam sees a child get killed by a land mine.
Plot summary from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Crew
- Written by: Jason Keller
- Cinematography: Roberto Schaefer
- Edited by: Matt Chessé
- Music: Asche & Spencer, Thad Spencer
- Production design: Philip Messina
- Produced by: Robbie Brenner, Craig Chapman, Marc Forster, Deborah Giarratana
Cast
- Gerard Butler as Sam Childers
- Michelle Monaghan as Lynn
- Kathy Baker as Daisy
- Richard Goteri as Gun Shop Owner
- Peter Carey as Bill Wallace
- Barbara Coven as Shannon Wallace
- Michael Shannon as Donnie
- Ryann Campos as Paige #1
- Madeline Carroll as Paige #2
- Mandalynn Carlson as Paige's Friend
Production
- Country: United States of America
- Language: Arabic, English
- Studios: Virgin Produced, Relativity Media, Mpower Pictures, Apparatus Productions
- Budget: $30,000,000
- Box office: $3,338,690
- Themes: africa, redemption, sudan, based on true story, biker, belief in god, duringcreditsstinger, child soldier, conversion to christianity, white savior
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