Gunnin' down a dream

Machine Gun Preacher attempts to tell the story of how real-life Pennsylvania hillbilly bad-ass Sam Childers got out of jail, became disgruntled by his former-stripper wife’s religious conversion—“bitch found Jesus,” as Sam puts it—and hit rick bottom. He bullied his family, hung out in bars where sleeves are frowned upon, robbed and assaulted some dealers, ingested buckets of drugs and alcohol, and stabbed a hitchhiker multiple times before tossing him out of his car. Then Sam himself finds Jesus, gets sober, turns suspiciously nice, gets into roofing, and builds his own church where folks listen to shitty music and Sam’s improvised sermons. Sam also goes to Uganda and Sudan, where he builds an orphanage in the middle of a war zone and occasionally takes up arms and wreaks bloody vengeance upon the Lord’s Resistance Army. He spends a fair amount of the film’s last third or so desperately trying to raise funds back home to buy a new truck for the orphanage, and I’m thinking, Dude, you could probably get some decent cash for a couple of those RPGs...

Not that that was the first such question I found myself asking while watching Machine Gun Preacher. The film, written by Jason Keller and directed by Marc Forster, who isn’t especially good with crafting spatially coherent action sequences—or, for that matter, spatially coherent garden parties—strains to impose a through-line on Childers’ larger-than-life endeavours but builds neither a strong narrative arc nor a persuasive study in unlikely redemption and radical altruism. Though presumably well-intentioned, the filmmakers—I refer not only to Keller and Forster but also executive producer/star Gerard Butler—seem stumped by the very questions that Childers’ thorny biography demands reckoned with, questions, for example, about the mightily messianic hubris involved in trying to clean up someone else’s civil war. Instead, the film offers a precariously sentimentalized depiction of child soldiers, a very thin portrait of what must be a near-impossible marriage, and eight varieties of bluster from Butler, including shaking, eye-bulging, and sweating. Childers is without a doubt one hell of a character. Probably too much of a character for this kind of plodding Hollywood treatment.

Quantum of Solace: 007 breaks still further from the past, bonds with a new audience

Careening from car chase to interrogation-gone-horribly-awry, from a foot chase across the crumbling rooftops of Siena, while a horse race collapses into bloody chaos in the streets, to a perilous rope-dangling punch-up amidst scaffolding and broken glass, Quantum of Solace, picking up where Casino Royale left off, making it the first James Bond movie to benefit from continuum, hits the ground running, leaving you as breathless as this sentence. It has a vague, dumb-sounding name—taken, ornery Bondaholics note, directly from Ian Fleming—but is the antithesis of the flabby action spectacle that plagues so many multi-million dollar event movies. The second outing for this renovated, revitalized Bond, beautifully embodied in the battered physique and wounded near-menace of Daniel Craig, is the shortest, sharpest, and most devastating entry in the long-running franchise. The tale, courtesy of Paul Haggis and Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, that turns on cold-blooded comeuppance and the looming threat of impenetrable powers working to horde the world’s dwindling resources, is indeed very bleak Bond—but who ever told you bleak can’t be thrilling?

Casino Royale sought a Bond with psychological nuance, or rather, one with any recognizable psychology whatsoever, and Quantum of Solace follows up on the promise. Which doesn’t mean that the film is ponderousness or explanatory, on the contrary, Craig’s Bond is cagey as befits a killer superspy, his internal turmoil not entirely obscure to the camera—there’s a scene where a friend dies in his arms—but hardly an open book either. That he’s consumed by wrathful grief over the death of his lover Vesper Lynd is all you really need to know about the previous film and it’s in any case made abundantly clear in the telegraphic dialogue sequences. The revenge theme is actually doubled with the introduction of Camille (Olga Kurylenko), easily among the most developed Bond girls, whose determination to kill a Bolivian general planning a coup d’etat supported by the CIA and an international organization disguising itself as an environmentalist group nicely dovetails into Bond’s agenda. That this agenda is as driven by personal motives as professional duty is essential to the drama, and the balance between the two is as ambiguous to us as it is to Bond’s superior, M, played with minimalist flair and spooky containment by Judy Dench. She’ll have to cut him lose once things get too unruly for MI6 to sanction, but you sense that she’s always rooting for him with the same troubling faith in vigilante justice that Commissioner Gordon holds with regards to the Dark Knight.

Quantum of Solace was directed by Marc Forster, whose filmography includes Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction and The Kite Runner, none of which allude to an artist with a hidden urges to blow shit up. Yet I’d venture to say that this is the best thing Forster’s done, a project that utilizes his sensitivity to theme and tension and annexes his tendency toward bathos and emotional kitsch. It is a common complaint of critics, myself included, that most modern filmmakers can’t piece together a comprehensible action sequence, but the frenzy of close-ups, wide shots and collisions that cascade throughout Quantum of Solace remind us of the oppositional argument, that such action in real life is hardly tidy and easy to follow, that instincts overrule thought, that movies don’t always have to give us privileged points of view, that we too can get excited and unnerved by the wild blur of action escalating to a climax. There’s a kind of adrenalized poetry in this, and few can do it with the zest shown here by Forster, cutters Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson, and Dan Bradley, whose fights were incorporated into the similarly dizzying braid of imagery in the Bourne films.

Looking over the reviews thus far, I see a lot of gripes about straying from tradition: What about the gadgets and car fetish? What about the bon vivant Bond who never sweats? What about the silly villains and their pets? What about the zany candy coloured sets? What about the casual misogyny? Well, sorry, those days are gone. And there is no Santa. You’d think with the Bond closing in on nearly two-dozen films we’d welcome an overhaul. Admittedly, I’m no Bondophile, but perhaps the cult can content themselves with the massive back catalogue while the rest of us are entertained, provoked and shaken awake by this bold new direction.