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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Left Behind

LEFT BEHIND (Vic Armstrong). 110 minutes. Opens Friday (October 3). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN


Well, at least they left Kirk Cameron behind.

The new adaptation of Left Behind is at least a mild improvement on the previous adaptation of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Christian-apocalypse blockbuster, simply by virtue of having real actors in it.

Nicolas Cage, Chad Michael Murray and Cassi Thomson are among the unlucky Americans stuck on earth after God transports the faithful to heaven in preparation for the final battle against Satan’s forces. To the actors’ credit, they actually try to give good performances while struggling with some very clunky dialogue. (The script is by Paul Lalonde and John Patus, who haven’t learned anything from their work on the previous Left Behind movie cycle.)

But though it’s nice that the Cage etc are trying, they’re still trapped in a squeaky-clean, very cheaply realized Bible story aimed solely at reassuring the faithful that they won’t have to witness the collapse of our impure, unworthy civilization.

But even that audience will be miffed that this movie focuses only on the earliest events of the first book of the Left Behind series, confining its focus to the ordeals of pilot Rayford Steele (Cage) and his daughter Chloe (Big Love’s Thomson) and leaving out all the table-setting involving secret Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia taking over the United Nations.

It’s also no fun at all, thanks to director Vic Armstrong’s inability to bring a single scene to life or resolve the tonal conflict between the grim events on screen and Jack Lenz’s weirdly optimistic gospel rock score.

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