‘Left Behind’ movie review

Name: Left Behind
Released: 2014-10-10T19:29:05+05:30

"GOD works in mysterious ways," says Chloe (Thomson) right at the beginning of Left Behind. Indeed. Otherwise what explains this dud of a film.

Rating: 1 out of 5

But don’t quote us on that. God forbid!

“GOD works in mysterious ways,” says Chloe (Thomson) right at the beginning of Left Behind. Indeed. Otherwise what explains this dud of a film based on, what some Christian circles call, ‘the Rapture’? In other words, an End of the World where the virtuous (including all the children) would be sucked into heaven by God, with the rest of humanity left to face pestilence, famine, war etc etc.

The second part is how Nicolas Cage may be feeling these days, but why drag the audience down with him? And drag the film does, starting with celebrated journalist Cameron Williams played with his usual dreamy-eyed laziness by Murray. In the successful book series on which this film is based, Williams is the central character. That honour firmly belongs to Cage here, but Murray does get a fair amount of space and you can’t escape him asking a woman who has just lost her infant, “What were you doing right at that instant?”. It’s better than asking how “she was feeling”, but really enough to have let loose that journalist into the world’s worst troubled zones armed with a satellite phone?

In the course of the film, Williams gets to romance the aforesaid Chloe (is that even legal, given she is a “college-going student”) and to prove himself quite the hero to everyone from scared old ladies to overwrought air marshals as the plane they are on witnesses the “vanishing”.

With Cage getting barely any exercise cooped up in the cockpit as the sole pilot — the second one was sucked up too — the other guy who gets plenty of action is the token Muslim on the plane. When he suggests that they all pray given that death seems near, the token comic — a dwarf — is incredulous. “Whose God? Yours or mine?”

What gets Cage’s character Ray more excited is flight attendant Hattie (Whelan), with whom he is about to enter into a dalliance. Chloe, who is Ray’s daughter, saw that coming before he boarded the plane, and he knows she knows. Still, up above, he is determined to earn his mile-high points, till “God” does his work.

Chloe spends the better part of the film running around New York and getting shocked at every other incident of a “vanished” person, when she is not getting almost crushed under dropping vehicles or being killed and mugged by rampaging mobs.

In fact, Whelan, despite that shirt with buttons straining at the chest, is the only one who survives this tragedy of a film with her honour intact, managing exactly what is expected of her role.

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They all find a god of some sort — perhaps none more helpful than a compass-wielding smart phone. But don’t quote us on that. God forbid!

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