Directed By Kevin Sorbo

Starring – Kevin Sorbo, Neal McDonough, Bailey Chase

The Plot – The only light after the world falls into chaos is a charming new leader (Chase) who rises to the head of the UN, but does he bring hope for a better future? Or is it the end of the world?

The film is rated PG-13

Left Behind: Rise Of The Antichrist – Official Trailer – YouTube

POSITIVES

Finding something to rave about in a Left Behind installment is a lot like seeking out a needle in a barn full of haystacks, but a couple of beneficial aspects to the movie’s prominence does keep it from reaching my lowest grade possible, all the while allowing this sequel to capably pick up where the franchise left off a whole eight years and one Nicolas Cage ago. The first is in the casting of that and other aforementioned characters, with Cage being subtracted, and Sorbo being added to our storied protagonist, Rayford Steele. Sorbo is surprisingly more invested and believable in the role, imbedding a palpable heart and sincerity to the motivations of the character that actually allows you to invest in, but not necessarily one that dominates the focus of the spotlight from his respective peers throughout the duration of the narrative. For that, you’d have to seek out Greg Perrow, who not only feels far too talented and compelling to be in a film this morally and entertainingly bankrupt, but also steals the show from some pretty well known actors, with a stoically rich and charismatic portrayal that pushed my interests to the story into overdrive whenever he invaded the screen. Aside from the duo of performances, Sorbo’s direction is occasionally a welcome addition to the dynamic of the presentation, particularly during scenes of intensity or action that momentarily succeeds in allowing the audience to forget about the student film production values. If any merit lies in Sorbo’s talents behind the lens, it’s that his motions of the camera garner a thorough documentation that never feels unnecessarily exaggerated, nor minimized in scope, instead steadying the weight of responsibility during pay-offs that are remarkable for religious renderings, especially in a sequel with a third of the budget as its big studio predecessor.

NEGATIVES

Why was a Left Behind sequel greenlit eight years after the previous one? Vulnerability of course. With a never-ending pandemic at its disposal, the script takes full advantage of its audience and their anxieties in fleshing out a full-fledged conspiracy theory for the screen that stands as the cinematic materializing of every fake news social media post that you’ve ever seen, allowing the rapture in question to echo more than a few notes of familiarity that audiences can draw from in the pandemic, and take to their own everyday inconvenienced lives. It’s very good at pushing all of the right buttons with its audience, with everything from the manipulative media, Jewish-run Hollywood, and of course religious persecution being just a few of the film’s many collective focal points, with a shoe-horned integration into the main plot that continuously put the storytelling on hold for characters literally looking at us the audience, so that we don’t miss the agenda that they’re shamelessly preaching. Because of such, the dialogue meanders with the kind of heavy-handed emphasis that drew more than twenty-seven painful groans out of me, immediately alienating me in the opening minutes while on its way to a two hour run time that it doesn’t even remotely earn. Because roughly 80% of this movie is exposition between two respective groups of characters, the developments often stall and sedate in place, straining the pacing in ways that feel every mile of that run time, and all with unnecessary overhead narration that might just be the strangest of the assorted ingredients to this colossal failure. This is conveyed by a character in the movie, which initially is framed as a mystery, but then revealed in the most inconsequential manner that clouds the logic of its rendering in the first place. The audio for these reads sound like they were recorded in a mason jar, and the placement of their usage completely overrides dialogue in the foreground of two characters without lowering their sound mixing for clarity, in turn creating as many as three voices that I initially took as the ones in my head telling me to run screaming out of the theater, but later discovered it to be the worst example of post-proudction sound mixing that I’ve maybe ever experienced. On other elements of the production values, the film abruptly begins and ends, making it feel like half of the movie still remains dormant on an editing room floor, the musical score is dull, spoon-feeding emotions and reveals in ways that never require you to pay attention to the storytelling, and the lighting and color-grading goes practically non-existent, leading to character engagements of the facial registry between characters often being obscured by the environmental elements that are often thought out and strategized in pre production planning. Aside from this, despite the conflict calling on everything from the end of times, to half of the world disappearing in the blink of an eye, the stakes from within my interpretation felt virtually non-existent, thanks in part to the minimized scope and scale of the direction, but especially the complete lack of depiction towards the antagonist, who goes unseen or unspoken until the film’s final half hour. Because the film didn’t care to flesh out the developments of their perspective, it immensely underwhelms the magnitude and urgency of what hangs in the balance, all the while relegating the aforementioned dual storytelling devices to oversaturation by the film’s midway point because the script refused to ever deviate away from the comfort of our respective protagonists.

OVERALL
The sixth and latest installment to the Left Behind franchise is a shamelessly manipulative and cinematically miscalculated blunder, even by religious propaganda standards. Though the performances of Sorbo and Perrow give the film a momentary pulse throughout the moral bankruptcy of its exploitative material, Sorbo’s direction simply isn’t given the proper budget to justify a big screen rendering, in turn leaving behind any hope and ambition for this franchise to finally make a believer out of me.

My Grade: 2/10 or F-