Just the Ticket #49: Gerry Got A Gun

No anecdotes or words of wisdom today, so I'll just jump right in with Machine Gun Preacher blazing.

MGP is one of the two films discussed by star Gerard Butler at his final appearance on The Tonight Show last year (the other being Coriolanus, reviewed here), and is based on the true story of Sam Childers, a murderous drug dealer who finds God and embarks on a quest of obsessive redemption that leads him to war-torn Sudan and the farthest reaches of his own sanity.

Butler, doing a better job of hiding his Scottish roots this time in an on-and-off blend of Southerner, New Yorker, and Pennsylvania tough-guy, shows he is just as adept at playing the uber-focused tortured soul as he is at leading an army into battle.

Michael Shannon (The Runaways) fills his typecast role as Butler's enabling, co-dependent biker buddy/drug partner, and on-screen wife Michelle Monaghan (Gone Baby Gone) and mother Kathy Baker (the Jesse Stone TV movies) provide moral support in turning our hero's life around.

But the real stars of Machine Gun Preacher are the South African people, who bring the Sudanese warzone to life. Director Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Quantum of Solace) does a credible job on the other end of the camera, portraying the hardships of life in a region like the Sudan (rampant disease, mutilation, villages burnt to the ground, children forced to kill their families at gunpoint, malnutrition, and a host of other problems we in America have little to no concept of) in a blend of graphic detail and Hollywood semi-gloss.

MGP is paced something like a superhero origin story mixed with Greek tragedy and more Disneyfied fare like We Bought A Zoo (reviewed here), but the events and problems addressed in Machine Gun Preacher are as real as it gets and far uglier than they appear on camera. To learn more about the real Sam Childers and show your support, visit http://www.machinegunpreacher.org/donate. The preacher will thank you.
B+

Another ages-old feud gets coverage from both sides in tomorrow's Just the Ticket as I review the History Channel miniseries Hatfields & McCoys and its inbred direct-to-video cousin, Bad Blood.

EDIT 6/16/2012: Apologies for the technical difficulties that occurred with this post overnight. Stay tuned later today for full feud coverage as promised.