This is a “based on true events” film about very real and very, very unpleasant goings-on in a part of the world that works in a way most of us, even if we have read a little about it cannot begin to comprehend.
It is the story of how a low life drug taking, hard fighting gang member and total waster turns into one of the good guys.
Released from prison Sam returns to his long suffering wife who, in his absence has discovered Christ. Initially cynical, as you would expect, Sam begins to embrace the teachings of the church. After hearing a sermon from a visiting missionary, he decides to visit Africa.
The mutation from feral crackhead to evangelist feels, I think a little simplistic, a little, well, a little unlikely, but that’s movies for you. Fully exploring such an enormous metamorphosis would need far more analysis than is possible in this medium. The point though, is that one way or another, to a lesser or greater extent that is what happened.
We have all seen news footage from the darker parts of Africa, and maybe skimmed a newspaper article or two so in the back of our minds we all know whole populations are being slaughtered…. and worse. This is a film about one man who got off his butt and did something about it, for real. A man who went to battle for the children of Sudan, the orphaned, starving, beaten victims of a world whose brutality is beyond our worst nightmares, suffering on a greater scale than earthquakes and volcanoes and floods have ever produced, a world with no law and no decency, a world of unspeakable horror and endless screaming pain, a world without hope or kindness. Sitting here in a comfortable flat on the South coast of England, with food in the kitchen, and a whole town of supermarkets, clothes shops chemists and surgeries within a ten minute walk, how can I ever understand such a place? How can I truly know what it is like to watch my mother being raped, my family tortured and butchered, to live without food or medicine or clean water, to be rounded up and traded like cattle, and all before I am 10 years old.
Sam was a product of the “underclass” of American society, a career prisoner always searching for his next fix, his life steeped in violence and seemingly without hope. Sam’s destiny was sliding toward overdose or another junkie’s switchblade. A mortuary slab seemed inevitable.
There are numerous moments in the film, moments that pull at the heartstrings and go some small way to showing us the horrors visited upon the innocents of a far off land. While surveying the site for his orphanage a landmine explodes. Sam rushes off to discover and scoop up in his arms the corpse of a child, a corpse with its legs blown off. Or the boy who won’t speak. Eventually he tells his story, of how the rebels forced him to club his mother to death to prevent him and his brother from being killed. Or the moment Sam pulls back the tarpaulin on a truck to discover a sea of enslaved children…. the moments pile up.
It would be very easy to write something tabloidy like, “Good is measured by deed and result, not by intention and theory. Extreme situations need extreme solutions. The people of the Sudan did not need another doctor or another truck of rice, they needed hope, and actions, they needed a hero. Gun toting Sam Childers, was such a man, the white preacher who was as at home gunning down child killers as he was building a house. Fuelled by rage, empowered by his abilities with hammer, an MK47 and his strengths of persuasion Sam becomes a legend, leaving in his wake a trail of dead rebels, a new orphanage and bucketfuls of hope”.
Somehow it doesn’t feel that simple, Sam’s life and work and the film raise some disquieting questions about the morality of doing Gods work with bullets but surely Africa needs such men, just as it needs the armies of aid workers. The rebel generals will not be stilled by prayer and compassion alone. They need to be broken apart and to fear retaliation just as those they terrorise live every waking moment wondering if it will be their last. Diversity, nature’s greatest trick, is a lesson to us all. We need bad good men, just as much as we need good, good men.
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