Review: ‘Left Behind’ (2014)

“Left Behind” is the second feature length adaptation of the first book of a hugely successful series of Christian books from the 1990s, a series of thrillers set against the backdrop of the Rapture, a worldwide event in which all of the world’s Christians, along with all the babies and children in the world, get instantaneously sucked up into Heaven, leaving behind their clothes and their possessions and oh yeah all the stinking non-believers who now have Armageddon and what not to look forward to, you know, all the worst parts of the Bible. And who better to usher us into this horrible wasteland than the one and only Nicolas Cage?

This movie centers on the Steele family, as commercial airline pilot father Ray (Cage) ditches the rest of his family to take a job on an overnight flight from New York to London so he can get some alone time with his brand new mistress (an attendant working on the same flight), while his daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson) gets into religious based arguments with her newly Christianized mother (Lea Thompson) and then takes her younger brother out for a stroll around the mall. And after Ray finishes disappointing his family and gets on the plane, the Rapture happens and people disappear from everywhere. But this whole movie is about Ray flying the plane and trying to get it back to New York before they run out of fuel and Chloe running around back in the city looking for her disappeared brother and traversing through all the chaos of the immediate aftermath of such a large scale event.

And yes in case you were wondering this movie is kind of terrible. The dialogue gets really clunky and the numerous CG shots of the airplane throughout the movie look cheaper and faker, as if they were running out of money as the production progressed and had to keep scaling back. Also I would say that the movie cuts away from the airplane too much to deal with the boring Chloe stuff on the ground, but the fact is not too much happens on the airplane outside of some yelling and the occasional crackpot theory that a little person first class passenger (Martin Klebba) shouts down as stupid. Hilariously there are several moments throughout the movie in which people say something along the lines of “I know what’s going on,” and then the movie cuts to another scene, as if to keep the audience in suspense as to what really happened. But we all know what happened, this is why we are here to begin with, for some good old rapture action.

“Left Behind” really only deals with a very small fraction of the end of the world stuff that is supposed to be kicked off by the Rapture, really dealing only with the immediate aftermath and even then sticking to two characters and their experiences. Sure there is also a reporter character (Chad Michael Murray) named Buck Williams who records stuff with his camera and buddies up to the captain on the airplane, and there are a bunch of little side characters on the airplane that all get their little moments and what not, but it is really all about dirtbag dad Ray and panic stricken daughter Chloe. Really the interesting stuff happens after all this Rapture business, what with the Anti-Christ and all that jazz, and a movie featuring both Nic Cage AND the Anti-Christ? Come on, that would be sweet.

This movie, though, is not sweet. There are a few unintentional laughs, but it looks cheap, Nic Cage never goes over the top with his acting, and all the real good stuff that is really seen in movies is being held off for the eventual sequels which will never be made. So is this movie just a waste of time for everyone involved? I’m afraid so.