Kevin Costner did it with Dances With Wolves. George Clooney did it Syriana and Good Night And Good Luck. Now Gerard Butler has proved he's a big-budget action man with a heart to match, investing much of the bucks earned from blockbusters such as 300 and P.S. I Love You into a much lower-profile but worthier project that probably wouldn't have got made without him.
Butler reportedly took a huge pay cut to play drug-dealer turned refugee protector Sam Childers in Machine Gun Preacher, and has said this part means "the world" to him. Will he enjoy the same plaudits as Costner and Clooney? Watch our trailer above and see what you think.
And here's the official blurb on the film, due in UK cinemas in November:
MACHINE GUN PREACHER is based on the true story of Sam Childers (Gerard Butler in a tour de force performance), a violent, drug-dealing biker whose faith leads him on a path to East Africa, where he finds his true calling as a machine gun-wielding protector of hundreds of refugee children.Following a brutal incident, Sam’s loyal wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) encourages him to turn to God and he resolves to change the course of his life. Renouncing his hell-raising ways, Sam journeys to Sudan as a missionary to help with the relief effort, leaving his best friend Donnie (Michael Shannon) to take care of his wife and daughter. There, he witnesses the atrocities that the locals endure at the hands of the vicious Lord’s Resistance Army. Villages are razed to the ground, women are raped and children are kidnapped and forced to serve as child soldiers. Horrified by what he sees, Childers becomes an avenging angel set on protecting the innocent. Inspired to create a safe haven for the multitudes fleeing enslavement he restores peace to their lives and, eventually, his own.