- 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
One of the great joys of home video is inducing cognitive dissonance by scheduling an ambitious double feature night. Pick the right two films, and you can work alchemical wonders in your own mind. I was once talked into a Halloween double feature bill of Monsters, Inc. and The Exorcist. My dreams that night put me on medication for the next three years.
Still, it’s good fun. This week’s Cognitive Dissonance Double Feature begins with MACHINE GUN PREACHER, among the stranger movies to see semi-wide theatrical release last year. Despite the title, this is no grindhouse thriller. Instead, Preacher is a gritty redemption drama starring Gerard Butler as a heroin-addled ex-con who hits bottom, finds God, then heads over to Sudan to rescue war orphans.
The film is based on a true story, a phrase which in movie marketing often means nothing at all. But in this case, the essentials of the story are true. In the late 1990s, roughneck biker Sam Childers really did fight vicious warlords while attempting to establish a Christian missionary and orphanage in the middle of a war zone.
The movie is kind of mess, but it’s an interesting mess, and more importantly it offers that rare movie commodity—a story you haven’t seen before. Butler is convincing as a violent man who channels his newfound zeal into two-fisted missionary work. Michelle Monaghan and the Michael Shannon check in as Childer’s wife and best friend, left behind to tend the home fires as Sam wages his holy war in Africa.
To his credit, director Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, The Kite Runner) doesn’t shy away from the brutal realities of the Sudan conflict. The movie’s tonal schizophrenia comes from crashing those images against the conventional redemption story arc.
