The first was on Friday night, when I sat down for my fifth viewing of Adaptation for my I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things bi-monthly 2021 series on this blog. I won't write much about the actual movie here, because I'm planning to cover it in its own post alongside Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for this series' only two-movie month.
But as a role for Cage, it represents the height of his smart decision making. It's an eccentric, unique, infinitely creative script that requires him to play two characters and stretches him to the absolute limits of his technique.
In the other movie, he's not even required to play one character.
That's 2014's Left Behind, which I watched on Saturday night, and which is not only not original, it's a remake of a movie that was already not very good.
I actually liked Vic Sarin's 2000 movie Left Behind, starring Kirk Cameron, more than any self-respecting critic should. I don't dismiss Cameron's proselytizing movies out of hand, and in fact quite liked Fireproof, about a firefighter trying to save his marriage. I see that I gave his rapture movie 2.5 stars on Letterboxd -- a rating given in retrospect years after I saw it, mind you -- and that's probably generous. But I've made a point in my career of calling a not-terrible movie a not-terrible movie, and the original Left Behind was not-terrible in ways that I thought were worth acknowledging. (I think that's just because I had never seen a rapture movie, and the movie had some things going for it just for being the first of its kind).
Vic Armstrong's 2014 remake -- why do all Left Behinds have to be directed by a guy named Vic? -- does not have that same advantage. And the Vic and Nic show is godawful.
Now, Cage always brings a modicum of skill, even when he's sleep-walking through a movie. But this is not a good performance and this is not in any way a good movie.
A few of the terrible things:
- Jordin Sparks plays the wife (ex-wife?) of a football player who steals a gun from a raptured sky marshal and waves it in everybody's face because she believes the rapture was a scheme by her husband to get back his disappeared daughter. This of course does not explain all the other people on the plane who have disappeared. This is not a good look considering that this is also the film's only significant Black character. (There's a really oversized Black dude who gets raptured, but he's only in it until the rapture, and only as the film's lame attempt to show us that Black People Are Also Nice. But then there's also a Black preacher who does not get raptured because he is not a believer, even though he's a preacher.)
- The most disagreeable character in the whole film is a little person, who is constantly angry at everyone else on the plane for the ways he perceives them to be condescending to him because of his height. In reality, I suspect most little people got over that a long time ago.
- Most of the acting. Especially unfortunate is the woman who is some kind of drug addict, who wears her sunglasses at night on the plane and looks like she's being electrocuted most of the time.
If you've noticed that all three of these mentions are of things that occur on the plane piloted by Cage, that's because this plane is in flight for almost the whole movie -- which may be what happened in the original movie, but I feel like it landed before then and got the hilariously named Buck Williams (there played by Cameron, here by Chad Michael Murray) on the ground earlier to start doing some action hero type things, rather than being stuck on the plane where he really has no agency and is not particularly involved in the resolution of events. So ultimately, it becomes more of a "plane in danger" movie than a rapture movie. (Interestingly, the word "rapture" is never spoken, kind of like the characters resisting the use of the word "zombie" in a zombie movie.)
Of course there's also a part on the ground where Cage's daughter (Cassi Thomson, should have been a more recognizable star/better actress) runs around amidst all the panic on the ground. One of the funniest indicators of the movie's general ineptitude is that a good 45 minutes after the rapture moment, when this character (Chloe by name) is making her way back to her house to see if her raptured brother or mother are still around, she sees a school bus go over the side of the bridge, empty of both children and the driver. So, um, did this driver get raptured 45 minutes after everyone else? And if so, why was he still driving around with a busload full of leftover clothing from raptured children?
Her mother is played -- until she is raptured -- by Lea Thompson, an actress I used to dearly love, who I initially assumed lost her way and became a crazy Christian over the years. (The internet tells me she has not made her religious views known, though Chad Michael Murray is a True Believer.) It was interesting to see her appearing in a role just about 30 years after 1985, when Back to the Future came out, and when she played a version of herself who was 30 years older than she was then. I'm glad to say that the real 53-year-old version of Lea Thompson looks better than the 53-year-old version imagined in that movie, though I guess we get two versions of that Lorraine, one good and one bad.
Cage is not a crazy Christian, that I'm aware of, so his involvement is for the same reason as his involvement in seven out of the eight movies he makes per year these days: a paycheck.
I hope it was a good one, because with every Left Behind he makes, he's a little less likely to appear in whatever the next Adaptation may be.
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