Based on Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s apocalyptic thriller about the end of the world — a 1995 bestseller that spawned a series of 15 additional books and three film adaptations — Left Behind centres on what’s known, in some Christian circles, as the Rapture. According to this belief, the End Times will be heralded by the bodily assumption of the righteous into heaven, followed by a period of pestilence, war, famine and death for those left behind.
(Translation: One fateful day, all God-fearing Christians will mysteriously vanish into thin air, leaving nothing but little piles of dirty laundry — and the rest of us infidels — where they once stood. It’s a viewpoint encapsulated by a bumper sticker you may have seen: “In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned.”)
This, in a nut shell, is the premise of Left Behind, a $16 million (Dh58.8 million) reboot by writer-producer Paul Lalonde of his 2000 straight-to-video adaptation of the first LaHaye/Jenkins book. Kirk Cameron of Growing Pains fame provided the low-wattage star power for that first film, which centred on an investigative journalist reporting on unexplained disappearances around the globe. Nicolas Cage is the new headliner, playing Ray Steele, the captain of an airliner whose co-pilot has inexplicably gone missing in mid-flight, along with a stewardess and several passengers. It’s “Airport 2014.”
I wish I could say that the upgrade is a good thing.
Cage, an actor who normally can be relied upon to provide a modicum of entertainment, even in — maybe especially in — his worst movies, delivers what surely will be remembered as one of the lowest-energy performances of his career. It’s tempting to call Left Behind a wake-up call to heathens, except that it is, simply put, an exercise in tedium. Slumber on, ye godless horde.
Amateurish
The film is amateurish on almost every level.
With the exception of Cage, who is out-acted by his 1970s-style sideburns, the cast is characterised by histrionics. Jordin Sparks is particularly awful as a distraught passenger whose daughter has disappeared. The general level of dialogue — characterised by such boners as “We have a right to know if we’re going to die!” — is lame. The antique-looking special effects, mostly featuring flying shards of broken glass, evoke an old episode of CHiPs. The editing is choppy, jumping back and forth, without logic, from the people on the plane to the plight of Ray’s atheist daughter (Cassi Thomson) back on the ground, where she seems to have misplaced her mother (Lea Thomson) and her little brother (Major Dodson).
The music sounds like it was recorded in a casino elevator. Make that three separate casino elevators. It ranges from plinking lounge music to swelling strings to pounding outtakes from a made-for-TV disaster flick.
To the movie’s credit, the shots of the plane — hurtling through the night sky with a plume of fire trailing from the wing after a midair collision with an unpiloted jet — are visually striking.
I have nothing against the fantastical, even sci-fi-like premise of the film. After all, Cage’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Knowing weren’t exactly documentaries, either. But if you’re going to make a movie about Christian eschatology that shoots for the mainstream, at least make it frightening, if you can’t make it fun.
Left Behind takes the end of the world and turns it not into a nightmare, but a nice long nap.
