No. 22 Machine Gun Preacher (2011) 52 of 100
I was aware of this film but hadn’t seen it before it popped up on my next to watch list. Gerard Butler is of course Paisley’s (well Ralston’s) finest but his movies aren’t normally my kind of thing. I assumed that this would be about a preacher with a machine gun, a bit like ‘Hobo With a Shotgun’, but it is in fact a bio-pic of Sam Childers a worthy man who looks out for kids in Southern Sudan. The film needs to set Sam up for a road to Damascus type conversion, so the first 20 minutes see him get out of prison and be a general scumbag. He yells at his wife for stopping being a stripper and he goes out on a bender with his old pal Donnie, played by our man Shannon. Shannon has a low rent role here, wearing a denim vest to show his lower status to Butler’s leather offering. Butler scoffs at his wife finding God but after some mildly tragic events he gets the message too. He finds a righteous path and the good Lord sends down a tornado so that he can get lots of construct...