“Machine Gun Preacher,” starring Gerard Butler, is not like the typical summer blockbuster movies that depict superheroes and are full of action and are heavily manipulated with CGI. Instead, it tells the true story of a biker, Sam Childers, played by Butler, who turns his life around by finding his faith and becomes a real life hero to hundreds of children in Africa.

The movie starts with Childers coming home from prison to find his wife who has found Jesus and left her job as a stripper to live a life free of sin. Childers disagrees and continues down the same path that had led to him being imprisoned. He eventually gives into his wife’s pleas for him to find his faith only after a wild night that ended in him almost killing a man.

Years pass and Childers volunteers with a church group to travel to Africa to build houses for the impoverished families struggling through the civil war. Once there after seeing the devastation Childers makes it his life’s mission to help the children of the war and it leads to him being the founder his own church and founding Angels of East Africa.

Marc Forster does a great job directing this gore filled and unapologetically realistic movie. Butler does an even better job in his portrayal of Childers, showing that no matter how noble a cause, man with even the toughest of burdens will make any hero buckle under the pressure.

You find yourself rooting for him, only to be briefly let down by Childers in the climax of the movie where he reverts to his old biker ways when he realizes that even as much as he wants to help the money and support just is not there. Just like any man can have his faults, so did the movie at times, feeling a bit too preachy to the point of being mildly annoying.

Perhaps this is part of the genius of Forster, making you feel like one of Childers’ regular church followers when he was becoming more and more fanatical about helping the children in Africa, to the point of losing touch with his life and family at home.

The movie is meant to be part-action movie, part-inspirational but for myself, I felt it needed more action, simply for that fact that I was left wanting to see more revenge by Childers on behalf of the children.

Also, walking out of the movie left me thinking that this struggle is still happening right now and children are being victimized in Africa and all over the world for that matter and it makes you think had you been Sam Childers would you have been able to do the same as he?

Machine Gun Preacher was released limitedly on Sept. 23, and can still be seen at the Arclight theatres in Hollywood and Pasadena as well as the AMC in Century City.