Left Behind

Left Behind (2014)

Runtime: 110 agonizing minutes

Directed by: Vic Armstrong

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Chad Michael Murray, Cassi Thomson, Nicky Whelan, Lea Thompson

From: Several different companies which should be ashamed of themselves

Even though it came out just last fall this already is an infamous movie, not due to any offensiveness but due to how bad it is. They were right! This is just horrible. I explain why in my Letterboxd review below.

I have several things to say before I get to the review proper:

It was years before I discovered this but in the canon of the original novels Rayford Steele (the character played by Nicolas Cage here) is from Belvidere, Illinois. I bring that up as the town I grew up in... Belvidere, Illinois! I swear this is true. I have no idea how the writers of the novels picked my town but they did.

My opinion (and your opinion) of religion won't and shouldn't have any effect on the review.

The main reason I saw this: to see if it was as bad as I had heard. Well, it is! I have never seen any of the previous Left Behind movies and I certainly haven't read any of the novels.

I don't even want to delve too deeply into the plot, except that The Rapture happens (meaning that everyone who is worthy goes to heaven and they leave their clothes behind) and those that get... left behind are made out to be pretty terrible people, so you get to see a lot of that here before, during, and after the big event. It's done in the worst of ways so you don't enjoy watching and hearing these dumb A-holes act like dumb A-holes.

As everyone else has said this is just inept all around, from most of the performances to the “special” effects and everything else. Believe me, the conversations over whether God exists and if He does have an impact on the world, those aren't exactly thought-provoking or intellectually stimulating theological vs. secular discussions. Furthermore, what's supposed to be New York state clearly isn't that... oh and there's also how no one in the movie is smart and it takes people ages to figure out that The Rapture happened, and as someone I follow explained in their review, the movie is much more about “tell” than “show” so things are done in the most blunt fashion possible, and also there's a pretty awful musical score throughout.

So yeah, there's a lot of nothing that happens in the film. It's more Nic Cage piloting a plane full of idiots and broad stereotypes than how on the ground most everyone still remaining immediately turns into a felon and Nic Cage's daughter tries finding her little brother among the chaos despite it being obvious that something supernatural happened as he vanished out of his clothes... it's just stupid, totally unnatural and much of it makes zero sense at all.

Director Vic Armstrong is a veteran stuntman and he's either been a director or a second unit director many times before so I don't know what went here but go wrong things did. Nic Cage is subdued here so this is just mind-boggingly awful.

An important point you can learn here is that the entire movie being a first act to a story that most likely won't be completed with any sequels...that's a bad idea. Even with the ending of this film being astoundingly awful to an incredible degree in a number of ways, there is no real good reason to ever see this. Save yourself from experiencing this agony.