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By now, I have seen almost all the movies directed by Marc Forster and he is definitely a hell of a director. Unfortunately, his career took a huge blow with 'Quantum of Solace' and even though I don't think this movie was that bad, he received much of the blame. Anyway, I hope he will recover soon and deliver once again some other great gems. Unfortunately, it seems that we will have to wait for a little bit longer since his following feature was once again rather disappointing. I mean, this true story was quite amazing but even though the material was really interesting, the whole thing never really worked and I never felt really involved during this movie. Let's take the intro for example. Basically, you get to see Sam Childers getting out of prison, then he gets back on the drugs and the booze, robs some drug dealers, almost stabs a man to death, cleans up his act, goes to church, some guys shows up there, talks about Africa and off he goes to fulfill his mission. And all of this took just about 30 minutes. That was serioulsy a awful lot to digest in such a short time. Unfortunately, even when the guy got to Sudan, the whole thing was still not really convincing. Basically, it became one of those movies such as 'Blood Diamond', 'Shooting Dogs' or 'Cry Freedom' where the action is focused on one single white man who seems to solve all the problem of the poor helpless African people. I know that most of those stories are actually true but I'm sure that there are 1000s of inspiring stories about African people rising up and helping their own kind. Above all, I was missing some depth concerning the main character and there was not much ambiguity about him but just the usual stereotypes going with this genre. Eventually, especially coming from a director like Forster who already tackled some pretty sensitive subjects in the past, the whole thing felt rather uninspired. To conclude, it remains a hell of a story and I still think is worth a look but the whole endeavor felt like a missed opportunity.
6/10
