In Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler is a drug-dealing thug who finds Jesus and promptly moves to the Sudan to help orphans and protect villagers from (remember Kony?) the Lord’s Resistance Army. There he has to apply his hard-won street-smarts to fight the gun-toting bad guys instead, knocking heads and blowing shit up along the way.
So, it’s not Shakespeare. But it is directed by Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, World War Z) so the set pieces are bombastic and Germanically competent. In fact, aside from the ubiquitous “Africa-as-endemic-failure-which-only-a-white-guy-can-save” ethos and the queasy, semi-simplistic God-squad stuff, it’s fairly entertaining and even Gerald himself doesn’t come off as quite such a tosser. It filmed in South Africa, up north somewhere, so that’s a plus.