The Nicolas Cage Left Behind Reboot is Probably the Most Prestigious Christsploitation Movie of All Time and It's STILL Crappy and Cheap
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When Nicolas Cage appeared in the 2014 Left Behind reboot it marked a sad nadir in the Academy-Award winning pop culture icon’s life and career and a high water mark for the Christsploitation sub-genre.
God, in his infinity mercy and compassion (towards Christians at least!) had granted the Christian Film Industry a great cosmic do-over. Thanks to the miracle of remakes, Left Behind, that massive Evangelical best-seller and Christian pop culture phenomenon, was getting a second chance to cross over and reach a secular audience understandably averse to explicitly Christian fare due to their richly merited reputation for being godawful.
Only this time the filmmakers had Nicolas Cage, one of the most beloved and gifted actors in film history, in a lead role. Left Behind was going A-list, baby! Or at least it was going formerly A-list.
Cage’s willingness to prostitute his extraordinary gifts for a cause that he does not believe in for a three and a half million dollar payday served as an unfortunate reminder that the actor’s creative and commercial glory days were over.
Rayford Steele, handsome pilot in need of God, isn’t a traditional role so much as it is a sad professional nadir, a cry for help. Cage was hopelessly addicted to buying castles and dinosaur bones and the elephant man’s skeleton. He paid a steep price for that compulsion in the films he was forced to make to pay off his massive debt.
There are bad movies and B-movies and cheap movies and direct-to-video movies and then there are Christian apocalypse movies. They’re a whole different category because of their need to proselytize at the expense of entertainment and also everything else and also because they are so predictably, universally terrible.
Cage crossed a line in lending his name and presence to this adorably, distinctively dreadful sub-genre and he did so for that most universal and understandable of reasons: money.
In Left Behind, Cage’s paternalistic papa has grown estranged from wife Irene Steele (Lea Thompson) after she comes down with a case of Jesus Fever. The disillusioned flyboy plans on going on a kissing date, complete with hand-holding, frenching and going to at least second base, at a U2 concert in jolly old England with a hot to trot stewardess who doesn’t care that they’re making baby Jesus cry through their infidelity.
His similarly non-believing daughter Chloe (Cassi Thomson) surprises her dad by visiting him at the airport, where she is hurt by his plans to cheat on her mother and strikes up a flirtation with dashing investigative journalist Cameron “Buck” Williams (Chad Michael Murray, a member of the triple first name Mafia).
Inside the plane where most of Left Behind takes place the Rapture happens. Good Christians who have accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior are sucked up to heaven by the Almighty while all Democrats, Jews and pot smokers are left behind to endure hell on earth.
But WHY? What could possibly explain this unexplainable phenomena? It’s Nicolas Cage and the guy from One Tree Hill who isn’t a kiddy-diddler in The Case of the Most Solvable Mystery in the World as these intrepid makeshift gumshoes try to figure out why the devout are vacationing forever in paradise while the wicked are left to fend for themselves during the apocalypse.
Could it have something to do with the “Rapture’ thing Rayford’s wife keeps yammering on and on about, almost as if it would have a profound effect on his life, survival and salvation?
Christian movies about the apocalypse are disaster movies by definition. Is there any greater disaster than the flaming end of civilization? Left Behind distinguishes itself by being a very specific kind of disaster epic, one that flourished in the 1970s before being eviscerated by the fourth top-grossing film of 1980: the airplane movie.
As parodies of disaster movies about troubled airplanes go, Left Behind is only slightly less funny than Airplane! The key difference is that Left Behind is a hilariously oblivious, un-self-conscious exercise in self-parody filled with stock characters and hokey archetypes executed without an iota of self-awareness.
Left Behind is so 1970s/80s in its sensibility that I’m surprised it doesn’t show passengers smoking on the plane or co-star George Kennedy or Eric Estrada. It includes such familiar stereotypes as the Texan businessman cowboy, the angry little person whose every utterance references his size and rage over it, with the exception of dialogue related to his gambling addiction, and a freaked out artist on the drugs.
While the passengers try to understand why it looks like an invisible steam-roller has reduced the holiest among them to a cartoonish looking pile of clothes and the overwhelmed pilot tries to land the plane safely his daughter assists him on land through her cellular telephone and several other wildly implausible tools.
Stuntman turned director Vic Armstrong stages an amusingly rinky-dink apocalypse on a budget in the campy scenes of mass chaos on the land and gives the action in the air the penny-pinching claustrophobia and simplicity of a bottle episode of a television show.
You’ve got to help me! My agent booked me in a CHRISTIAN movie! I’m so embarrassed!
Given the campy ridiculousness of the whole affair Cage is surprisingly restrained. Cage was deep into his concerned dad phase by this point and hooks into the thorny emotional reality of wanting to form a closer bond with his daughter while having secrets of his own in a film that is otherwise flamboyantly phony and artificial.
The 2014 Left Behind benefits tremendously from comparisons to the Kevin Sorbo-directed sequel/reboot, which I wrote about recently for my new Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
Left Behind at least attempts to tell a story that might connect with non-Godly audiences. It fails, of course, but it at least makes an honest effort to be an actual movie instead of 100 minutes of scripture and right wing pontificating in film form.
Sorbo’s manic manifesto injects its director-star’s unfiltered, uneducated political beliefs in audience’s eyeballs for 120 exhausting minutes. It’s about Jesus but also about how everyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing the devil’s handiwork.
Compared to the Sorbo Left Behind this is a masterpiece of subtlety, understatement and craft that leaves its creator’s beliefs fascinatingly ambiguous.
That’s the crazy thing about the Nicolas Cage Left Behind. It’s probably the best, most expensive and prestigious Christploitation movie ever made and it’s STILL largely a cheap, semi-competent pile of crap.
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