Butler armed with bibles and bullets

With: Gerard Butler, Michael Shannon, Michelle Monaghan

IN the market for some manliness this weekend? Don’t bother, it’s all gone. Ditto dangerously tight jeans, sweat-soaked T-shirts, rocket propelled grenades and burning senses of injustice. Gerard Butler, him fae Paisley, has acquired the lot to use in Machine Gun Preacher, an action drama with more swagger than Jagger, more rambunctiousness than Rambo, more ... well, you get the picture. Jane Eyre it isn’t.

Just as well the tale has its roots in truth, otherwise everyone, including the audience, would have to be carted off to a darkened room at the end to be sponged down. Hold on to that business about verity; you’ll need it, and lots of faith, to overlook the picture’s several sins.

Butler’s performance, for once, is not among them. He throws himself into proceedings with all the energy he displayed when playing for Celtic in that charity match against Manchester United in the summer. As with his football, he is never the most subtle of actors, being more Nelly the elephant than Balotelli, but in this case his all-guns-and-grins-blazing style suits the part. Making him, and the picture, look infinitely better are Michelle Monaghan (Source Code) and Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) as his character’s wife and best pal respectively.

Butler plays Sam Childers, a biker from Pennsylvania. As director Marc Forster shows in early scenes, Childers was once a wrong ’un. He’s not two minutes out of jail before he is taking drugs, robbing ne’er-do-wells and urging his wife to go back to her better paid job of erotic dancing. Not the Messiah, clearly, but one very naughty boy.

Fortunately, wife Lynn has found God while her hubby has been in jail, and would like Childers to discover him too. Eventually he does, but not before some more descending into the depths. To their credit, Forster, screenwriter Jason Keller, and Butler don’t try to sugar the pill about Childers’s early life. It’s only later that the film gets lost in a moral maze.

Childers is now going to church, starting his own building business, being a caring husband and dutiful father. It is while on a church trip to Africa that he ventures into Sudan and sees the horrific effects of the civil war on the region’s children. Kidnapped from their beds, brutalised, and forced to fight, a generation is at the mercy of the warlords. Childers resolves to do something.

So begins a long process of raising money for an orphanage in Sudan and going over to build the place. At the same time, Childers builds a church across the street from his home, where sinners like himself will be welcomed. Tea-breaks are clearly the devil’s work as far as this builder is concerned.

Forster, who helmed the redemption drama Monster’s Ball and the JM Barrie biopic Finding Neverland, is a director who can go about the job with some subtlety when he has a mind to. When it comes to the suffering in Sudan he shows just enough to convey the horrors while not appearing exploitative. Similarly, the wife and best pal characters are well handled. Monaghan loves this new version of her husband, but she’s also worried that he’s becoming too involved. Shannon, though short of screen time, does a grand job fleshing out the character of Donnie, a charity case closer to home.

So far, so sensitive, so good. Which makes it all the more jarring when the picture suddenly lurches into gung-ho territory as Childers, finding that reasoning with the rebels won’t work, decides to take a more pro-active stance, thus earning him the nickname of the film’s title.

Perhaps there isn’t a way of showing a man firing an RPG without him looking like some bargain bin Rambo, but Forster and Butler attack these scenes with what looks like unseemly glee. To redress the balance, an aid worker is wheeled on to accuse Childers of making the situation worse by bringing more violence to a country that has had its fill.

Just to get us even more lost in the moral maze we see Childers, on his return to the US, becoming increasingly angry and lashing out at those who don’t live up to his expectations. Forster clearly wants us to look on this man as a complex, driven individual and debate whether he is saint, sinner, or a mixture of both, but there are too many mood changes, too abruptly handled, to even begin to work him out. When a resolution of sorts arrives, it is horribly pat given all that has gone before.

Amid the confusion, Butler makes a convincing avenging angel. He’s far more at home here than he is in such criminally drippy rom-coms as PS I Love You or The Ugly Truth. Put him in some Speedos and a cape (300), or give him a machine gun (as here) and he fits. A fighter, not a lover, the Butler boy.