The stories of Christianity have made for some powerful onscreen works — Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue the Maysles brothers’ Salesman among them. Then there’s the horrendous fear-based evangelism of the Left Behind series. Based on a series of 16 novels (16!) from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins the repent-or-perish rapture series has inspired three Kirk Cameron movies and a shit-ton of PC games.
It is written that everything will eventually be rebooted so the series has been resurrected with a remake. Films like God’s Not Dead and Heaven is for Real have proven that prophets can be profitable if they keep their messages relatively vanilla but Left Behind bears the mark of an entirely different beast with its fire-and-brimstone end-times theology.
The preachiness is countered with plenty of kitsch with the end result rivaling The Asylum’s plethora of shark movies or even Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories. The film’s shitty faux-professionalism comes courtesy of director Vic Armstrong a veteran Hollywood stuntman who was the body double to Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and Christopher Reeve in Superman. Oh yeah he also directed one other film before this an obscure and ill-fated Dolph Lundgren action flick from 1993.
Outside of star Nicolas Cage who’s half asleep in his 71st onscreen credit Left Behind’s cast is comprised of yesterday’s C-listers and today’s busiest extras no doubt swallowing their pride for the financial dependability of a Christian blockbuster.
Decked out in normcore fashions straight out of a 2002 Costco catalogue this ragtag team of former-somebodies fill out the roles from the original Left Behind: Cage plays Captain Rayford Steele Nicky Whelan plays Hattie Durham Chad Michael Murray plays Cameron “Buck” Williams Jordin Sparks plays Shasta Carvell. Their fictional names would have you believe this was an adaptation of a cat lady’s self-published romance novel.
Rayford is a pilot going through a midlife crisis. It’s his birthday and though he knew his daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson) was coming for a visit he decided to pilot a red-eye to London. Part of the reason is to escape his wife Irene (Lea Thompson) who’s grown annoying since her recent conversion to Christianity. But he’s also got his eyes on Hattie (Nicky Whelan) a bubbly blond stewardess whose humanity is defined by those things and nothing else.
Unsurprisingly the non-Christians in the film come across pretty well Christian. Rayford and Hattie’s G-rated flirting leads to an illicit adulterous getaway to a concert from every Christian’s favourite non-Christian-but-actually-very-Christian band U2. “I thought the tickets would be a little closer to the stage” says Rayford dejectedly.
Cage’s work in this film is revelatory. His physical appearance combines the dyed-dark hair of a Christian metalcore fan with a face that’s at once tired and leathery and CGI-smooth. Near comatose he summons enough energy to deliver dialogue that sounds like it’s gone back and forth through Google Translate too many times. “Either I’m going crazy or the entire world is insane” he mumbles.
Rayford isn’t the only one saying ridiculous things. Buck who constantly reminds everyone that he’s an investigative journalist recalls some time spent in the aftermath of some tsunami somewhere. What happened next? “Mudslide. Buried the whole village under 10 feet of slime” he says.
Halfway into the film millions of people are raptured to heaven leaving behind neat piles of clothes and thus ushering in the end times.
The bulk of Left Behind takes place on a comically shoddy soundstage designed to look like the first-class section of a nondescript airline. Even Airplane! had a better airplane. The seats are populated by a hilariously diverse cross-section that represents nearly every ethnic economic and age group. There are some senile old people (whose mental illness is played for comic relief) some Muslims (who are constantly accused of terrorism natch) a rich business man a fat Christian guy a drug-addicted white girl who’s either British or Australian (her accent is impossible to decipher) an Asian math and science whiz (of course) and an over-protective mother who pulls a gun out of thin air.
That’s not to mention Melvin Weir (Martin Klebba) a mean-spirited dwarf with a gambling problem. Admittedly it’s nice to see a little person given a complex character that digs deeper than his physical appearance but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers from including a morbidly offensive scene where he’s punted from the plane compete with tacky sound effects.
While the worldly characters are ridiculous the actual Christians in the movie are broadly painted caricatures. Rayford figures out that a handful of passengers were raptured by digging through their belongings while flying the plane. One disappeared woman left a watch with “John 3:16” etched into its face while another left a day planner with the word “BIBLE STUDY” written in all-caps and underlined.
As Rayford figures shit out in the sky chaos ensues down below. Looters swarm the city with items that look to be from a church rummage sale while poor Chloe has her purse snatched by some cretins on a slow-moving Vespa.
Most of the action comes courtesy of vehicles whose drivers were raptured including unmanned car crashes a school bus speeding into the river and not one but two plane crashes. There’s also a ton of window smashing going on in this movie including an evocative scene where in the midst of a deep lamentation Chloe throws a Bible through a pane of glass.
As the credits rolled and the opening lines of the movie’s theme song blared (“Life is full of guns and war / And all of us got trampled on the floor”) I realized that this Left Behind remake is a perfectly disastrous disaster movie.
Though it will start precisely zero valuable conversations about organized religion it will leave none behind in pleasing two distinct opposing demographics — the stern right-wing fundamentalists of the world will no doubt appreciate it for its no-holds-barred end-of-days message while cynical midnight movie lovers will find countless laughs in its all-out awful absurdity. Unintentionally funnier than This is the End and less frustrating than The Leftovers Left Behind is end-times entertainment at its best.
