The story of Sam Childers, a former drug-dealing biker tough guy who found God and became a crusader for hundreds of Sudanese children who've been forced to become soldiers.
It’s gratifying to see Butler giving a proper acting role the old college try. Despite his best efforts, Forster’s film, while pulling no punches, still somehow manages to miss the mark.
Material that might have made a terrific documentary instead becomes a worthy drama. Well-meant and well-made, it’s full of fire and brimstone but short on revelation.
Overly preachy and overly long. A missed opportunity.
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.
Butler can do the standard machismo, but hasn't the chops to suggest the personal complexity that lay behind Childers's volte-face.
The harrowing subject matter...deserved and demanded more sophisticated treatment than it gets in this simplistic picture.
While the film might be biographically accurate, it isn’t artistically satisfying: real people are inexplicable in a way that characters in films shouldn’t be, and consequently, he feels half-finished.
An exploration of the character and his questionable sanity would have been fascinating enough.
Plot holes hobble the gloss; at least two gun battles abruptly end at what looked like a critical moment. At other times, you're wrong-footed more pleasantly: an encounter with a fragrant doctor doesn't resolve into cliche, and the ending is mature.
Try harder, or don't try at all.
A documentary would have been the appropriate genre.
General release. Check local listings for show times.