Living in Canada is like being one of the happy pagans in THE WICKER MAN. It's a carefree and mostly Godless existence. Religious fundamentalism is a cultural difference between us and our neighbors down south, and it's difficult for us to wrap our minds around how important Born Again culture is over there. I'm not sure how LEFT BEHIND fared in Canadian box office, or if it had a theater run here, but I can assure you we all though having Nicolas Cage and the guy from ONE TREE HILL starring in a paranoid fundamentalist fantasy was a great fucking idea on paper. Let me assure you, LEFT BEHIND is not only absurd in theory. It's a psychotic work of art in its own right that operates within a parallel dimension where the only characters who are even remotely normal are invisible.
Rayford Steele (his excellency of burned out actors Nic Cage himself) is a horny scumbag commercial airplane pilot who started cheating on his wife (Lea Thompson) because she became a Born Again Christian when he wasn't looking. He gets called on a trip to London on the day his daughter (Cassi Thompson) decided to fly home to be with her parents for the weekend. Unfortunately, rapture happens when Ray is flying over the Atlantic Ocean, shit goes south and he needs to figure his way back to New York, to see what God left his two timing ass to work with for the last seven years of mankind. But a lot of people disappeared on his plane and a lot of pilots vanished out of planes flying in the sky, so amidst all that chaos, making it home is no sure thing.
Unless, you're severely Born Again, it's impossible to appreciate LEFT BEHIND for what it's trying to be. It's not a movie that has normal people for target audience. Hypothetical concerns about the fabric of reality are thrown out the window in increasingly hilarious ways. At one point heroin makes a woman hallucinate. There's so many wrong things with that scene. She takes the quickest fix ever in an airplane bathroom. I'm still not sure if the screenwriters understood the process of cooking a fix, or even that it's injected. LEFT BEHIND counts several clichés (single mother, random Muslim guy, midget), so it needed a drug addict and realism me damned!
The heroin addict scene was funny but it's by far not the funniest thing about LEFT BEHIND. Another random woman effortlessly brought a gun on the plane. I mean, it's not like she tried to even smuggle it. It was in her handbag all along. What was it? The airport scanners were raptured before the people? My favorite thing though is Cassi Thomson character who becomes obsessed about finding her brother after he vanished from her very arms. She spends half the movie checking hospitals just in case he, I don't know, ran right out of his clothes and into the traffic? I mean, it's not like she hallucinated his disappearance. It happened to everybody around her at the same freakin' time!
The heroin addict scene was funny but it's by far not the funniest thing about LEFT BEHIND. Another random woman effortlessly brought a gun on the plane. I mean, it's not like she tried to even smuggle it. It was in her handbag all along. What was it? The airport scanners were raptured before the people? My favorite thing though is Cassi Thomson character who becomes obsessed about finding her brother after he vanished from her very arms. She spends half the movie checking hospitals just in case he, I don't know, ran right out of his clothes and into the traffic? I mean, it's not like she hallucinated his disappearance. It happened to everybody around her at the same freakin' time!
The faces of terror.
I have never read the Left Behind novels. I can't say I've even seen a physical copy of one of these, but I know they were extremely popular. I can't account for the quality of the writing in the novels, but the screenplay of LEFT BEHIND didn't really care about whether or not it was telling a decent story. It doesn't really try to create a link of empathy between the viewer and the protagonists, which is the basic law of storytelling I can think of. LEFT BEHIND is a religious horror movie that attempts to coerce its viewers into terrified submission to God by putting its protagonists through a series of highly symbolic end of the world scenarios. If you decide to take this movie seriously, you'll either come out of it a Born Again Christian or extremely angry, but don't worry. It's really hard to give LEFT BEHIND any kind of storytelling credibility.
I like seeing bad Nicolas Cage movies as much as the next guy, but I've never figured out how he manages to suck that much. I mean, he showed in LEAVING LAS VEGAS that he could act. He has an interesting, weathered look that should make him a perennial casting favorite for more serious movies. LEFT BEHIND feels like the end of a long tailspin for him, that included hanging out with has beens and wearing t-shirts of his own face at Guns N' Roses Las Vegas concerts. It has the same level of silliness. Obvious biblical message aside, LEFT BEHIND is worth a good laugh (if you can get the movie for free), but it doesn't even compete with all the great apocalyptic fiction coming out these days. It's a B-movie so excessive and obnoxious, I was surprised not to see Nicolas Cage burst in flames during the ending credits.
I like seeing bad Nicolas Cage movies as much as the next guy, but I've never figured out how he manages to suck that much. I mean, he showed in LEAVING LAS VEGAS that he could act. He has an interesting, weathered look that should make him a perennial casting favorite for more serious movies. LEFT BEHIND feels like the end of a long tailspin for him, that included hanging out with has beens and wearing t-shirts of his own face at Guns N' Roses Las Vegas concerts. It has the same level of silliness. Obvious biblical message aside, LEFT BEHIND is worth a good laugh (if you can get the movie for free), but it doesn't even compete with all the great apocalyptic fiction coming out these days. It's a B-movie so excessive and obnoxious, I was surprised not to see Nicolas Cage burst in flames during the ending credits.
