Left Behind
Let’s cut to the chase: Left Behind is an awful movie. You already knew that; no one walks into a late-period Nicolas Cage (Outcast) movie about the Rapture expecting anything genuinely good. You want to know just how bad Left Behind is — is it the lo-fi cheap bad of the original Left Behind or the relentless insanity of something like The Wicker Man?
Is Left Behind the good kind of bad movie or the bad kind of bad movie?
Cage stars as Rayford Steele, a pilot in the middle of an affair at 30,000 feet when the Rapture strikes. He, his daughter (played by Cassi Thomson, Switched at Birth) and a hotshot cable news reporter (Chad Michael Murray, Chosen) remain stuck on Earth as chaos and your run-of-the-mill biblical s— go down all around them.
Impressively, the new Left Behind barely manages to rise above the sea floor-low bar set by the original Left Behind. It’s true that 14 years later, digital cinematography has enabled this cheapo film to look much less bargain-basement than the original, but high-tech cameras don’t totally make up for shoddy camerawork and horrifically bad effects. Left Behind is riddled with flat images, poor framing and jarring, continuity-breaking cuts.
Bad as it is, criticizing Left Behind for its merely below-average camera work seems mean-spirited when confronted with the even less competent writing and acting. At its infrequent best, dialogue is merely functional, but frequently devolves into a muddle of barely concealed Bible-thumping nonsense.
Much of the movie feels interminable. Scenes that should be short drag on and on and on mercilessly, with only the occasional genuinely funny gaffe to liven up the terribly dull proceedings. Even Cage fails to deliver anything remotely engaging.
The only thing noteworthy about Left Behind is its soundtrack. Not because it’s noteworthy — God, no. The Left Behind soundtrack is beyond the normal realm of awful. The cheesy saxophone solos mixed with generic shopping-mall elevator Muzak, god-awful R&B and bargain-basement movie cues do a far better job of humiliating the movie than I or any other reviewer could ever do.
It’s impossible to overplay how laughably inept the soundtrack is. The music is both the first awful thing in the movie that hits you and the only part of the film that lingers afterward. The crappy script, stiff acting and schizophrenic cinematography are all things you’ve seen before. In fact, it’s about on par with the original Left Behind.
The soundtrack? That is the stuff of legend.
