Left Behind (2014)
Movie rating: 3/10
I was looking for some cheesy fun with Left Behind, the second adaptation of the first novel in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s 16-book series about the end times, inspired by Christian dispensationalist views of the Book of Revelation. I found it, but the film was much blander than it should have been. It’s not a very good movie, but passably entertaining enough that I was having fun by the end.
The film revolves around the rapture in which millions of people suddenly vanish and are sent to heaven, leaving behind only their clothes. We’re meant to understand those raptured up are either good Christians and/or the young and pure. In the wake of this earth-shattering event, planes are left without pilots and cars without drivers; widespread panic and looting break out, and society breaks down into chaos.
Among those “left behind” are our hero, pilot Rayford Steele (Nicolas Cage), whose daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson) had flown in from college in to visit him for his birthday. Rayford tells her that he can’t make it because he had to pilot a flight to London at the last minute. But it quickly becomes apparent Rayford has grown apart from his wife and Chloe’s mother, Irene (Lea Thompson), a newly devout Christian. Chloe sees her father flirting with attractive flight attendant Hattie Durham (Nicky Whelan). While Irene is among those sent to heaven, Rayford, Chloe, and Hattie are left to suffer through the apocalypse.
The funny thing about Left Behind is that while we see some perfunctory scenes of planes and cars crashing, stores looted, etc., most of the movie ends up feeling closer to ’70s disaster movies like the Airport series—and by extension, the now more well-known parody of that series, Airplane! The movie’s cheesy script and effects don’t help. There were moments I yelled out lines from Airplane! at the screen. Passengers on board Rayford and Hattie’s plane include famous investigative reporter Cameron “Buck” Williams (Chad Michael Murray) as well as a devout Muslim (Alec Rayme), an angry little person (Martin Klebba), a drug-abusing socialite (Georgina Rawlings), a Texan businessman (Gary Grubbs), the wife (Jordin Sparks) of a famous football player, and a conspiracy theorist (Han Soto).
One of the big selling points for me was Nicolas Cage in the lead role. I’m of the opinion that Cage, with his “Nouveau Shamanic” acting style, is interesting in any role he plays no matter how bad the film is—or at least that was my opinion before I watched Left Behind. Not only is Cage miscast, but his performance is the blandest I’ve ever seen him. Maybe it suits the character, a flawed but ultimately heroic protagonist, but that characterization doesn’t allow Cage to go batshit crazy in the way fans have come to love. He plays the emotional beats well in the second half of the movie. Still, RogerEbert.com critic Christy Lemire was accurate when she described Cage’s performance as “oddly inert”.
The rest of the actors do what they can with the mostly dull and wooden dialogue they’re given. The movie takes a while to get going, and nothing that happens before the rapture is all that interesting. Once the rapture does happen, the movie doesn’t go far enough. A Left Behind adaptation should have gone all-in on the Bible-thumping and fire-and-brimstone, fundamentalist Christian evangelism. That would have been much more entertaining—in the same way televangelists are “entertaining” as obvious frauds and demagogues who exploit people’s sincere beliefs to bilk them out of money while propagating the most backward, reactionary interpretations of Christianity.
In the books, Rayford and others become born-again Christians who form a group called “the Tribulation Force” that battles the Antichrist. That would have been more exciting, fantastical, and in keeping with the heavy religious themes of the books. Sadly, we get nothing like that here. Apparently, this adaptation doesn’t even adapt the whole first book, just the first few chapters. As a result it largely plays out as a standard disaster movie, where the main concern is landing the plane safely à la Airport (or Airplane!).
Despite all that, I enjoyed myself watching this movie. It’s not the kind of bad movie that makes me angry how bad it is, but rather the kind I can enjoy and laugh at—as long as you don’t think too deeply about the implications of its message.
I should point out the idea of the rapture, as an event in which those who are saved vanish to heaven and the rest are left on earth to suffer through the end times, is not found in historic Christianity and is a comparatively recent doctrine, which first appeared in the 1830s and is mainly held by certain U.S. evangelicals. The idea of the rapture presented in Left Behind is fairly disturbing when you think about it. At one point a character asks how a benevolent God could allow so much death and destruction to occur through these events. It’s a good question. Then there’s the film’s evident position that only Christians go to heaven. The Muslim character, Hassid, is a good man and devoutly religious; at one point he suggests to his fellow passengers that they should pray. But none of that matters, Left Behind tells us, because he’s Muslim. I assume followers of other non-Christian faiths would meet the same fate according to LaHaye and Jenkins.
In any case, if you’re looking for a heavy discussion of theology, you won’t find it in Left Behind. This is a mediocre airplane-set disaster movie with a little fundamentalist end-times theology as a treat. File this one under “good bad movies”.