There absolutely was a surface level enjoyment to this film, but it's ultimately just the tip of what appears to be a much more interesting iceberg.

| Mar 24, 2021

The sight of a Kalashnikov-wielding white man swooping to the rescue of black children is awkward to say the least... But Butler brings a blazing intensity to his role.

| Dec 6, 2020

A decent film based upon a compelling story, but you can't help but think it could have been so much more.

| Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 15, 2020

The film always respects the faith that drives the story, but it raises more questions than it answers.

| Mar 21, 2018

it can be a bit... preachy, if you pardon the pun

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 28, 2013

With an exploitation-friendly title like Machine Gun Preacher you'd think this movie would be the soul brother of Hobo With A Shotgun. Unfortunately, that is not so.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Feb 11, 2013

Despite a competent performance from Butler, Machine Gun Preacher tackles way too much material to present a cohesive onscreen telling of the Sam Childers story.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 2, 2012

It's an uncomfortable marriage of sentimental genre conventions and real-life tragedy shown with graphic detail. It does bring you inside the main character's internal struggle, but doesn't seem focused enough as it sways into action film territory.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 4, 2012

We're given surprisingly little food for thought when it comes to the question of the complicated tensions between Christian faith and violence.

| Original Score: C | Jun 15, 2012

In the end it devolves into something disappointingly ordinary, which, given the proven skills and sensibilities of director Marc Forster ...

| Original Score: 82/100 | Apr 29, 2012

The one-note macho man characterization of Childers comes off as a bit boorishly self-righteous.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 6, 2012

It is an overblown, histrionic, cluttered and a nowhere near well enough developed mess, the erstwhile humanitarian a one-note caricature I knew little more about at the end than I did at the beginning.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 27, 2012

Butler misfires as a man of God and violence.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Dec 5, 2011

O Childers kathgorhthhke gia arketo kseplyma twn praktikwn toy sthn aytobiografia toy, h tainia, eytyxws, arneitai na ton katadikasei kiolas san planemeno barbaro

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 20, 2011

It is commendable that Gerard Butler, director Marc Foster and writer Jason Keller have tried to bring the issue of child soldiers to as wide an audience as possible - but though its heart may be in the right place, it never finds a steady rhythm.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 7, 2011

The film's attempt to tell Childers' story in the context of the bigger horrors being perpetrated in the Sudan feels like an unnecessary burden that Forster's middlebrow approach can't suppo

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 6, 2011

It's rabble-rousing material, and the final credits, in which we see footage of the real Childers strutting his unedifying stuff, suggest that a documentary would have been the appropriate genre.

| Nov 6, 2011

Yes, it's yet another story about white people helping poor black folk, but as tales of imperialistic cultural colonialism as spiritual growth go, this one is solid stuff...

| Nov 6, 2011

Butler, bless him, tries to give us everything here... John Travolta's Wild Hogs, Stallone with a soul, Arnie with a proper mission and Bruce Willis minus the wisecracks, vest and shiny bonce.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 4, 2011

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 4, 2011