We all love ourselves a good end of the world. At least when it's a movie. Mind you, there are those who are hoping beyond fiction, or the potential real causes for such a thing. I go with the movie flirtation. Amongst other things you can check out the latest state of the art in special effects. In latest years, when you pick a film starring the most overrated of all stars, you might just end up seeing an end of times variation. The line-up Nicholas Cage heads this time is for what must be Michelle Bachman's favourite movie.
The first part of the film you spend hoping it'll kick in soon, this end of the world, and with wondering if all the badness you chew yourself through is intended, say, as a reflection on cliché character set-up in a writer's cheek instead of a tongue. The music is of much help here, because it is as cheesy and clumsily clue-driven as the acting and the screenplay. Hunky hero meets girl on airport and they engage in meaningful witless conversation about tragic things; music on clue. Daddy has to fly a plane on his birthday and cannot be with daughter, so they have a heart to heart with only slightly different music on clue. Daughter right back to hunky hero, and the same music on clue as before. It gets worse, though.
Turns out the only reasonable person within the story's realm is mum, who everybody thought of as crazy, because she just knew what dawned, and it literally happens in a flash, and also quite literally as they say in the bible. Yes – it's the rapture!
Kids are lifted and saved, because they're good, and faithful Christians are saved, even if they're packing a gun. The rest are left with the, spooky, no, actually not, left with the comically empty clothes of those risen to Heaven and with having to figure it out, down on the ground, though not really, while making their way through the havoc unleashed by the ensuing panic, and up in the clouds, in every sense of the expression, trying to deal with airplane issues that include disappeared and now assumed naked passengers and a fuel leak over the Atlantic. And they do figure it out, the whole to be expected cast necessary for a Christian lecture tale, the drug addict, the gluttonous candy lover, the greedy business man, the angry midget, the vain stewardess and of course the wife-cheating captain alias Mr. Sad Puppy-Eyes. And once they figure it out they express regret over not having had time for the kids, being so job-orientated and, off camera and presumably cut, for eating so many candy bars. Again with much help by the music and an equally unoriginal, uninspired script.
We got action, since that plane needs to be landed safely, captain Puppy-Eyes resolving he cannot let those people die with all their sins on their minds, and we got family values, as daddy and daughter find back to one another via cell phone, plane-landing and other heroic acts that are potentially redeeming in the eye of the Lord.
Here's my favourite little detail. Amongst the predictable cast of washed together characters we also have the kind, gentle, friendly, reasonable and faithful Muslim. And he really is kind, gentle, friendly, reasonable and faithful. He takes care of the old lady shaken with fright, he does his part in settling conflicts. So no trouble with the orthodox end of Islam to be expected there. Also because they just might miss the bigger picture: here we have a deep believer in an only slightly different version of the same god, and he's good, he's faithful, he's all a deity can wish for, and yet he's among those who are NOT lifted to Heaven. Because he believes in this slightly different version. Yes. Oops.
And it all ends in the to be expected reunion of loved ones, having survived a near fatal plane-landing that went exactly the way we knew it would, now looking at the burning city and forward to years of darkness. After which they'll do fine, promise, as we've witnessed them finding back to faith.
The whole thing is one ugly piece of literal bible evening Christian propaganda coated in an excess of unhealthy sugar and aimed at the extremely gullible, made by those who have at this point only movie- making while waiting, salivating, for the real thing. And the viewer is the one left behind, with trying to decide whether Mr. Cage is either desperate and gropes for just any role offered to him, or whether he's a fundamentalist Christian himself, trying to contribute in spreading the message. And Zeus knows, this film is messagy.
It also confirms that with Christian issues-themed material it is very much as with right-wing humour: it doesn't work. It's uninspired, it's lacking fabric, ground to stand on and anything that can remotely approach convincing sense, and it inevitably results in fabulously bad acting.
Anything you wish to see that is already a huge set of steps up the ladder to quality, watch a Troma production. Which is, in these dark times, where I turn to in prayer: please, Troma, spoof this one!
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