Image via Complex Original
To avoid any misspent cash this weekend, listen up, Hobo With A Shotgun fans: Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler’s latest attempt to make us forget that he’s pissed on his 300 reputation with a series of painful rom-coms, isn’t another shameless and gleefully insane throwback to old-school exploitation movies. The title Machine Gun Preacher certainly implies that it’s the kind of flick you’d catch on a double bill with Hells Angels On Wheels, but director Marc Forster’s (Monster’s Ball, Quantum Of Solace) dramatic action film occupies real estate within a completely different subgenre of cinema, that of the always polarizing “white savior” movies.
Though it's dressed in an appealing, Rambo-like aesthetic, Machine Gun Preacher is, at its core, the “based on true events” tale of Sam Childers (Butler), an ex-biker and convict who finds religion and travels to Africa to rebuild homes for the country’s impoverished residents stricken by the aftereffects of civil war; lest it only be inspirational, Forster’s pic is also concerned with violent sensationalism, depicting Childers as an automatic-weapon-toting freedom fighter unafraid to let blood flow in the name of justice.
Compared to Hollywood’s recent output of movies based on heroic caucasians, Machine Gun Preacher’s shoot-’em-up angle makes it far more interesting than its racially pandering peers. But, still, it’s the latest in an elongated line of movies focused on selling us the idea that things always work out as long as there’s vanilla around. For a look at the films that actually make Machine Gun Preacher look in touch, proceed through our countdown of The 10 Lamest White Savior Movies.
Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
10. Dangerous Minds (1995)
Director: John N. Smith
Stars: Michelle Pfeiffer, Courtney B. Vance, George Dzundza, John Neville, Renoly Santiago, Wade Dominguez
In every sense, Dangerous Minds feels like an outsider’s interpretation of hood education. With its plot centering on a white lady/ex-Marine who inspires a room full of underprivileged ghetto youths through her teachings (bet you never heard that one before), the flick immortalized by Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” is written with the inner-city awareness of a Paris Hilton-like heiress.
All of the “tough” students are lazy archetypes, including the pregnant teenager, the delinquent with a heart of gold, and the bully with the hot girlfriend. The dialogue spoken by the kids is all trite (“How the fuck you gonna save me from my life, huh?”), and Michelle Pfeiffer’s classroom tactics are terribly uninspired (she bribes students with candy bars, 'cause clearly dying of diabetes is preferable to dying of ignorance).
There is a silver lining, though: The producers opted against using the title of Lou Anne Johnson’s non-fiction source material, My Posse Don’t Do Homework. Especially if the assignment was to count all of the false notes and clichés in Coolio’s accountant’s favorite movie.
9. The Help (2011)
Director: Tate Taylor
Stars: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney
Take the white savior out of The Help and you’ve got a great little film about black housekeepers in 1960s Mississippi who are struggling for acceptance and fair treatment. But then you’d also have a movie that barely tops 40-50 minutes, since director Tate Taylor’s adaptation of the 2009 best-selling novel by author Kathryn Stockett is mostly concerned with the unimportant pursuits of its main character, a young wannabe honkey writer named Skeeter (Emma Stone).
As the film’s two central maids, Aibileen and Minny, actresses Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer give awards-worthy performances, but, in Hollywood’s typically limiting way, they’d both only be eligible for Best Supporting Actress. Given a handful of powerful monologues, Davis and Spencer are only allowed to emote in Stone’s presence, dictating their true stories to Skeeter for her non-fiction book.
In theory, that’s not a bad approach, but The Help needs to white-wash its narrative through the ever-dreaded “savior” character and her own uninteresting subplots (the worst of which involves the dullest of love interests), instead of using Skeeter as a framing device to delve into Aibileen’s and Minny’s pasts. In other words, The Help could’ve used more of the actual goddamn help.
8. Cool Runnings (1993)
Director: Jon Turtletaub
Stars: John Candy, Leon, Doug E. Doug, Malik Yoba, Rawle D. Lewis
Reflecting upon Cool Runnings, it’s easy to recall the sports comedy’s more endearing qualities. Silly in tone, director Jon Turtletaub’s fictionalization of the Olympic-qualifying Jamaican bobsledding team has enough genuine laughs to recommend, as well as a delightful John Candy at its center. We’re quite sure that some folks will question the movie’s inclusion here, but we’ve only got three words for those people: Open your eyes.
Lame more so for its goofy stereotypes than its underlying white-man-saves-the-day theme, Cool Runnings is a film that saves most of its grace for Candy’s character, a former bobsledding gold medalist who coaches the Jamaicans on how to fly down the icy tubes. But for the majority of the movie’s black characters, they’re saddled with sophomoric gags and the duty of milking one joke—that black people hate the cold—for all of its comedic merits. One character even pees his pants while stuck in the cold—all that’s left is the sight of Candy giving dude a diaper.
7. Freedom Writers (2007)
Director: Richard LaGravenese
Stars: Hilary Swank, Imelda Staunton, Patrick Dempsey, Scott Glenn, Mario, April L. Hernandez, Kristin Herrera
If there’s an actor’s handbook, this has to be one of the boldest-typed rules: When all else fails, play a fish-out-of-water teacher in a ghetto school. It’s the safest way to flex dramatic muscles, requiring very little heavy lifting other than rehashing the performances of every other respectable thespian who’s waved the metric ruler and hugged it out with schoolyard gangstas on screen.
Following in the footsteps of Michelle Pfeiffer, Morgan Freeman, Jim Belushi, and countless others before her, two-time Oscar victor Hilary Swank used her awards clout to get Freedom Writers made, which is noble—you can’t hate on someone who champions a project meant to inspire kids and promote equality. But, with the all-too-familiar Freedom Writers, Swank and the filmmakers merely Xeroxed better (Stand And Deliver) and lesser (Dangerous Minds) versions of the same exact plot.
Playing real-life teacher Erin Gruwell, who motivated a classroom full of Long Beach, Calif., ruffians (none white, mind you) back in the mid '90s, Swank’s nauseatingly perky and upbeat; placed alongside her uniformly insensitive and cold-hearted teaching peers, Swank’s Gruwell is too on-the-nose. It’s like she’s Captain Save-A-Thug, beamed down from another planet to defy the school’s widespread cynicism.
6. The Soloist (2009)
Director: Joe Wright
Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Jamie Foxx, Catherine Keener, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Nelsan Ellis, Stephen Root
Jamie Foxx really must have thought he had something special with The Soloist. After winning an Academy Award for 2004’s Ray, the actor-singer wallowed in a string of B-level action flicks before settling into director Joe Wright’s adaptation of journalist Steve Lopez’s non-fiction book about his run-ins with a mentally challenged homeless man who was once a cello prodigy studying at Juilliard. With Robert Downey Jr. cast as Lopez, the actor’s melanin-deficient skin color puts The Soloist into definite white savior territory.
Foxx, finally given a character as complex and tragic as Ray Charles, surely banked on a second fondling of Oscar. Unfortunately, out-of-his-element director Joe Wright (a costume drama expert prior to The Soloist) was the one who got a bit too touchy-feely with the material. Cramming the film with unnecessary musical montages and lathering on the obvious emotions like chunky butter, his directorial choices squander Foxx’s solid acting; in the case of Wright and Foxx, The Soloist is actually a “white director fail,” not just a “white savior movie.”
5. Hardball (2001)
Director: Brian Robbins
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Diane Lane, John Hawkes
The kid actors in Hardball, a baseball movie aimed at families but connecting with barely anyone, deserve our deepest sympathy. Unbeknownst to them, their desires to break into acting led them to sign on to a brutally formulaic and, even worse, totally boring misfire directed by a king of cinematic blanks, Brian Robbins, the hack behind some of Eddie Murphy’s most painful comedic offerings (Norbit, for instance). But even worse, the upstart actors were saddled with carrying Hardball’s dramatic weight in the presence of a miscast Keanu Reeves. The only things his white ass can save are speeding buses and critics’ efforts in writing freshly worded compliments.
Typically wooden, Reeves plays a gambler who turns to coaching an inner-city Little League team as a means to paying off a debt. In every scene, his young co-stars out-act their older “esteemed” cast mate; the kids all look like they’re having a blast, but Reeves, with his signature robot-in-human-form charisma, drifts through Hardball like a lobotomized surfer lost in the projects.
4. Avatar (2009)
Director: James Cameron
Stars: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Laz Alonso, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore
On its way to breaking every box office record in existence, James Cameron’s massive Avatar was met with endless praise for its technical achievements, which we’re not about to argue against. Visually, it’s undeniably breathtaking, employing new, state-of-the-art effects and justifying the usage of 3D better than any movie before or after. It’s not easy to have audience members sit in a theater for nearly three hours with uncomfortable plastic glasses on their heads and keep them entertained from start to finish—we get that.
But what’s not given enough lip service is Cameron’s paper-thin script, his unimaginative mash-up of Ferngully and Dances With Wolves. The central thesis of Avatar is simple: the white man (Sam Worthington) must save an indigenous tribe of foreigners (here, the very foreign alien race known as the Na’vi) from evil bastards hell-bent on destroying the natives’ land for financial gain. Cameron’s tired message of “whitey saves all” is masked by Avatar’s science fiction coating and CGI wizardry, but anyone with half a brain, or at least a slight grasp on racial issues, should be able to see right through the façade.
3. The Air Up There (1994)
Director: Paul Michael Glaser
Stars: Kevin Bacon, Charles Gitonga Maina, Yolanda Vazquez, Winston Ntshona, Sean McCann
Oh, where to begin here? For starters, let’s acknowledge the fact that The Air Up There thinks so poorly of its African villager characters that it hinges their well-being on an American white dude (Kevin Bacon), a selfish college basketball assistant coach whose initial plan is to exploit the tribe’s slam-dunking prince. And how about the prince himself? Next in line to take over his land, young Saleh is quick to chuck a deuce to his royal father and friends in hopes of playing hoops and banging collegiate groupies.
Had The Air Up There not been so lightweight, it might have offended quite a few African natives. But the movie, which is basically a series of “look at the white man try to assimilate” jokes, has nothing to say about cultural acceptance, nor does it have the ability to amuse anyone over the age of 10.
In the end, of course, Bacon’s character dons the tribal paint and helps Saleh’s people overpower their rivals in a not-so-friendly game of roundball, and, by middling sports movie standards, it’s not a bad contest to watch. It just requires the patience to withstand diarrhea gags and the hilarity of hearing an African guy say that he learned English from Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition.
2. Radio (2003)
Director: Michael Tollin
Stars: Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris, Debra Winger, Alfre Woodard, S. Epatha Merkerson, Brent Sexton
It’s a toss-up as to who gets the bigger shaft in Radio, black people or handicapped people. To pick one, let’s go with the latter, though director Michael Tollin’s painfully sentimental film fits the “white savior” bill to the tee. It’s just that, due to Cuba Gooding Jr.’s laughably off-key turn as a mentally disabled football lover, Radio goes out of its way to denigrate the less intellectually fortunate.
Going full retard (for Gooding’s sake, 2008’s Tropic Thunder arrived five years too late), the Academy Award winner—yes, the guy from Boat Trip once took home an Oscar—turns the character of Radio into an unfortunate mascot. But then it’s Ed Harris to the rescue, playing the high school football coach who allows Gooding’s Radio to help out with his team despite players’ and local residents’ reluctance to accept the disabled guy.
Tollin hammers the story’s emotions over viewers’ craniums with the force of Thor’s hammer, scoring his already hammy flick with exceptionally melodramatic music and using Gooding, who’s all kinds of bad here, as a cipher to earn “Aww, look at the adorably slow man” sympathy. We just feel bad for the helpless black handicapped men who’d bitch-slap Gooding if ever given the chance.
1. The Blind Side (2009)
Director: John Lee Hancock
Stars: Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron, Tim McGraw, Lily Collins, Kathy Bates
In 2006, writer Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side: Evolution Of A Game presented an in-depth and honest look at the tough road to success taken by Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Michael Oher. With Oher as the main character, Lewis’ text followed the resilient guy from his days growing up in the slums of Memphis through his years fighting against educational headaches and racial discomfort, all on his way to an NFL contract. As written by Lewis, Oher’s story could make for one hell of a sports biopic.
And we’re still waiting for it. Director John Lee Hancock’s 2009 adaptation of Lewis’ book certainly isn’t that; no, The Blind Side is actually a movie about Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), the football-loving, white mother of two who took Oher into her home and looked after him during his high school and college years. Why? Because Hollywood loves a good white savior story, and The Blind Side, which depicts Oher as little more than the black version of Lenny from Of Mice And Men, is arguably the film industry’s most egregious example of reductively color-bland storytelling.
Insult, meet injury: In a move that showed the Academy’s pussyfooted inclinations, Oscar voters elected the commercially gigantic The Blind Side as a Best Picture nominee, and, furthermore, crowned Bullock as the year’s Best Actress recipient. If cheap southern accents, blond hair helmets, and artificial emotions are what makes an acting performance “award-worthy,” then The Blind Side is Bullock’s Meryl Steep moment, for sure.