Good God Almighty, Left Behind Was Boring as Hell
Wow. I didn’t think it was possible, but somebody made a boring movie about the End Times. Not only that, but a boring adaptation of Left Behind, possibly the single nuttiest pop-cultural phenomenon ever coughed up by the American religious tradition. This movie landed Nicholas Cage, wild-eyed wacko genius, and he spent most of it flying a plane. There wasn’t even a single mention of the Antichrist.
Left Behind is a lot of things (most of them terrible and appalling) but a snooze shouldn’t be one of them, and I want my goddamn money back.
Confession: I was very, very excited for this second, bigger-budget adaptation of Left Behind. You must understand my deep personal history with this franchise. I was raised deep in the Bible Belt by a committed non-churchgoer; in the second or third grade, a friend turned to me in the lunch line and announced that she was worried about my soul. As a tween, I spent a fair bit of time worrying I might burn in the lake of fire for all eternity.
This existential angst was only exacerbated by the explosive popularity of the Left Behind books, which were everywhere at the time. I even got through one of them, probably at the urging of my grandmother. There was at least one Suburban at my high school with a bumper sticker declaring that, “In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned.” To this day, I have occasional surreal dreams about being left behind. (Mostly I just walk around finding out who got Raptured, feeling really fucking chagrined.) How could I not face my childhood terror in a movie theater, armed with a bucket of popcorn and some cookie dough bites?
This movie should have been Nicholas Cage’s finest hour. Because the series is goddamned insane, like if you shot The Wicker Man full of meth and hung a “The End Is Near” sandwich board on his back and shoved him into the middle of an Atlanta mall. At the beginning of the first book, God Himself personally foils an attack on Israel. The protagonists band together into a “Tribulation Force” to fight the charismatic Romanian who is, duh, the Antichrist. Oh, and convert a bunch of sinners before the clock runs out and Jesus returns to start smashing heads at Armageddon. How could Cage NOT nail this? Come on:
So I put down my copy of Hollywood Babylon, put on some pants and headed into Times Square to catch a Saturday night showing.The movie opens in an airport that purports to be JFK (it looks more like Tallahassee Regional, but OK), and we meet our four main characters: Rayford Steele, a pilot played by Cage; “Buck” Williams, a TV news personality portrayed by One Tree Hill‘s Chad Michael Murray; Chloe Steele, Rayford’s pouting daughter; and Hattie, a flight attendant introduced as she’s applying hot-pink lip gloss and sliding on Jackie O sunglasses so we know her ass ain’t getting Raptured.
“Buck” (no, that’s really his name) is apparently so well-known that wherever he goes, people want his autograph. He is also the kind of investigatory creep who’ll hit on a college student in an airport coffee shop, because he’s so impressed with her willingness to interrupt the nice Christian lady just trying to explain to Buck that, hey, maybe all these natural disasters are happening because then End Times are upon us. The movie is not bothered by this blatant sketchiness; rather, we’re supposed to cluck cluck at these two non-believers and their skeptical conversation about God and tragedy. DON’T YOU GUYS KNOW THE RAPTURE IS COMING? Soon you will see the error of your ways but it will be too late, sinners!
We’re 15 minutes into the movie and I’m already amusing myself with the thought of an irate John Calvin bursting through the screen like the Kool-Aid Man.
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