LEFT BEHIND
DIRECTOR: Vic Armstrong
CAST: Nicolas Cage, Chad Michael Murray, Nicky Whelan, Cassi Thomson
CLASSIFICATION: 13V
RUNNING TIME: 110 minutes
RATING: *
THE rapture won’t come soon enough for the unfortunate souls forced to suffer through Left Behind, the big-screen reboot of the direct-to-video, faith-based film series starring Kirk Cameron.
Essentially playing like a spoof of ’70s-era disaster movies, this adaptation of the books written by Jerry B Jenkins and Tim LaHaye demonstrates that a bigger budget and a bigger star (Cage) doesn’t necessarily make ridiculous material any more palatable.
After delivering its first Bible verse within the opening minutes, the film introduces us to Rayford Steele (Cage), a pilot unhappy with his wife Irene’s (Thompson) religiosity; his religion-sceptic daughter, Chloe (Thomson); and Buck Williams (Murray), a news reporter who strikes up a flirtation with Chloe before boarding her dad’s flight from NYC to London.
Chloe has arrived from college to celebrate her father’s birthday, only to discover that he’s about to embark on a transatlantic flight. Exacerbating her anger is his apparent closeness with a sexy flight attendant who practically clings to him at the airport.
Her suspicions are not unfounded, as Ray is indeed planning a dalliance with the blonde once they arrive in London.
Not long into the flight, a bizarre event occurs. Many passengers, as well as a flight attendant and the co-pilot, mysteriously disappear. We soon learn that the occurrence is happening across the globe, with millions of people vanishing, including Chloe’s mother and younger brother.
The film alternates between scenes taking place on the plane, with the left behind passengers panicking, and Chloe desperately attempting to find her brother amid the ensuing chaos.
Realising that the co-pilot and flight attendant were devout Christians, Ray soon figures out that what’s occurring is the event which his wife has long been predicting, with only children and true believers falling under its aegis. When an errant aeroplane sans pilots clips his aircraft’s wing, he’s faced with the task of returning his plane to JFK Airport safely even as his fuel supply dips perilously low, as if the film had morphed into Airport 2014.
Complicating his task is the motley assemblage of frantic passengers, including a devout Muslim (apparently only Christians get to go to heaven); the wife of an NFL quarterback who thinks that her husband has somehow engineered her daughter’s disappearance and begins waving a gun procured from a vanished air marshal; and an angry dwarf whose outbursts seem mainly designed to provide comic relief. The only thing missing is Helen Reddy as a singing nun.
Meanwhile, Chloe, under the impression that her father’s plane has crashed, climbs to the top of a tower with the intention of doing herself in. But just as she’s about to jump she receives a call from her dad and Buck, who entrust her with finding a place for the plane to land since all the nearby airports are closed. She goes about her task with ingenuity, clearing a debris-strewn highway and navigating the plane toward its destination with the handy compass app on her phone.
Awkwardly combining religious proselytising with disaster-movie tropes, Left Behind, with its terrible performances, fails miserably on every level. – Hollywood Reporter
If you liked, the Kirk Cameron version of Left Behind, you might like this.