The Abysmal New Left Behind is an Adaptation of Director-Star Kevin Sorbo's Twitter Feed as Much as It's an Adaptation of a Best-Selling Novel

The third adaptation of Left Behind is a clumsy metaphor about COVID and every bit as dreadful as you think.

It’s crazy that evangelical Christians are so bad at entertainment considering that their entire religion is based on the best-selling book of all time, a lurid, pulpy, blatantly moralistic potboiler called the Bible. 

Have you read the Bible? I haven’t but it’s apparently full of gnarly shit: sex and violence and incest and talking snakes and unspeakable perversion and God whipping the Devil’s ass and vice versa. 

You’d think a crazy-ass book like that would inspire some righteous b-movies but Christians have proven consistently and hilariously incapable of making entertainment that is not deeply embarrassing on every level. 

These kooky cinematic Christians haven’t let flaming, flagrant incompetence keep them from spreading the Gospel through some of the shittiest movies you’ll ever see in your whole goddamn life. 

At the turn of the millennium the Jesus-Cinematic Complex became convinced that the Left Behind books, a series of best-selling adventure novels about the Great Tribulation and end times, would be its salvation, its path to the promised land of boffo box-office and critical respect. 

Left Behind, Christians adorably believed, would be their Raiders of the Lost Ark. It would be their Star Wars. It would be explicitly Christian entertainment with major stars, big budgets, impressive production values and dazzling special effects, a sprawling cinematic epic that could only be told over multiple films.

The Left Behind series sold an ungodly number of books despite sucking. Why wouldn’t a cinematic adaptation be a roaring success as well? 

Left Behind was going to be Christian film’s ticket to the big time, a Christian movie as entertaining, professional and accessible as anything Steven Spielberg, George Lucas or Walt Disney created. 

That was the idea at least. The problem was that Christian film’s idea of big time blockbuster entertainment looked to the rest of the world like direct-to-video camp and its conception of A-list star power began and ended with scoring professional Christian Kirk Cameron as the lead and the other guy from Steven Spielberg’s wildly forgotten Always as its second lead. 

Left Behind dramatized what it incorrectly saw as a wildly cinematic subject: The Great Tribulation, that horrible era after good Christians are called up to heaven for their eternal reward alongside baby Jesus and the Big G while sinners are left on earth to suffer the torments of the damned once the Anti-Christ institutes a New World Order/Great Reset and forces the suffering masses to take the Mark of the Beast. 

How fucking metal is that? It has everything. The apocalypse. The Rapture. The Devil. Heroic bands of Christians leading the resistance. An epic, winner-takes-all battle between the forces of ultimate good and ultimate evil. Death, destruction and devastation on a global scale. The highest possible stakes. 

The Great Tribulation certainly seems to have all of the elements of extremely commercial entertainment but the 2000 Left Behind was a leaden, stilted, hopeless clunker for several very good reasons. 

The Great Tribulation is ostensibly an exciting subject for secular entertainment. Unfortunately making a movie based on a part of the Bible much of the moviegoing public is not terribly familiar with involves artlessly unloading continents worth of information and exposition about end times scripture, biblical prophecy, the Anti-Christ and the Rapture. 

If a movie requires audiences to learn a textbook worth of information just for it to just barely make sense then it is fucked. That’s Left Behind. It does not subscribe to the dictum “Show, don’t tell.” Instead, it thinks that it is necessary to tell, and then tell some more, and then continue telling, and then if there’s any confusion in even a single audience member’s mind, to never, ever, ever stop telling. 

It did not help that the Left Behind movies were ministry first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth and entertainment a distant seven. They were all about saving souls and instilling Godly, righteous fear. If they happened to entertain, that was a nice bonus but it was never the primary concern. 

It never is.

Even with Nicolas Cage, one of the greatest and most beloved actors of all time, if not the single greatest and most beloved actor of all time (hey, I’m a little biased), the 2014 Left Behind reboot was at best semi-competent and mostly professional. It differed wildly from the first adaptation of Left Behind in taking place largely on a plane and being a 1970s-style disaster movie with a hard-on for Jesus. 

Now actor and director Kevin Sorbo has needlessly and fruitlessly resurrected the franchise for a low-wattage, low-energy, low-budget affair that feels like an extension of Sorbo’s Twitter feed as much as it is an adaptation of a best-selling novel.

Sorbo has created a Left Behind for the post-COVID era. It’s a muddled manifesto that makes its point as crudely and stridently as that meme your great-aunt posts on Facebook of Dr. Fauci in a Nazi uniform with a Hitler mustache. 

Sorbo’s big idea for Left Behind is to make the Rapture and its aftermath a metaphor for COVID. In Sorbo’s big, clumsy hands the Rapture is EXACTLY like COVID. It has the same effects and teaches the same pat lessons.

Left Behind is so ham-fisted in its treatment of the Rapture as a metaphor for COVID that I was surprised to discover that in its world, COVID happened as well. 

After suffering mightily from the one-two punch of COVID and the Rapture mankind is understandably in bad shape. Can you even imagine what American society would be like if all of the good, Christ-loving souls who loudly and publicly profess their Christian faith, people like Donald Trump, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kanye West, Scott Baio and Herschel Walker were all swooped up in the Rapture at the same time and all that was left on this festering hell hole we call earth would be fake Christians like Jimmy Carter? 

A nation like that would be screwed. No wonder Left Behind depicts a world gone wild where suicides have spiked, as has every other violent crime.

For about forty percent of its runtime Left Behind could run a graphic at the bottom of the screen stating This is what the filmmaker’s believe and the film’s message. 

Sorbo uses the character of Buck (Greg Parrow), a hard-charging journalist who sees through the media’s lies, obfuscations and pure evil, as the primary mouthpiece for his beliefs and also the beliefs of every other Twitter celebrity Conservative. It’s Buck who angrily informs us, and ostensibly his viewers as well, about how after the Rapture, the mainstream media tried to spread fear and paranoia and keep everyone shaking and shivering in their homes and treating the government, the media and even popular social media sites as their Gods instead of a certain carpenter from Nazareth with some kooky ideas about loving your fellow man. Buck even tells the sheeple watching him not to take their Vanishing vaccine. 

I understand how Sorbo could see similarities. After all, hundreds of thousands of Christians who worshipped the one true Lord and Savior—Donald J. Trump—and refused to get the Mark of the Beast (AKA the COVID vaccine) died heroic, Christian and very necessary deaths and were all called up to heaven for a never-ending pool party while the rest of us were left behind to experience hell on earth, AKA Sleepy Joe “Let’s Go Brandon” Biden’s first term. 

Ever wonder what the J in Donald J Trump stands for? It’s Jesus. 

Trump is never mentioned in Left Behind but his predecessor is. Sorbo manages a weird swipe at the never-impeached, non-disgraced two term president and Nobel Prize winner when Buck says that Anti-Christ Nicolae Carpathia (Bailey Chase) is treated like a rock star or a movie star more than a leader, not unlike Barack Obama. 

In a major unforced error, Left Behind seems to be implicitly conceding that it can’t mention Trump in this context because he fits the profile of The Anti-Christ perfectly. He is, after all, a false prophet whose  cult sees him not just as a force for good in the universe, but as a Godly, messianic figure literally sent from heaven to save our nation from socialists and degenerates. 

In Left Behind the Anti-Christ is a demonic Romanian with a name only slightly less overtly sinister than Hitler Devil McDracula. Instead of being Donald “Jesus” Trump, he’s everything that Trump rails against incoherently: a globalist, United Nations-loving monster who wants the world to come together as one to worship government and science and social media rather than the J Man. 

Buck learns that social media is a tool of the devil, that the entire Fake News lame stream media are serving Beelzebub, and that social media mogul Jonathan Stonogal (Neal McDonaugh) is, you guessed it, literally in league with the devil. 

But because Buck is spitting the kind of cold, hard, easily disproven facts you might see or hear on OAN, NewsMax, Truth Social, Kevin Sorbo’s social media and Steve Bannon’s podcast, he’s dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. 

You know who else was derided and dismissed as a conspiracy theorist? Jesus. He had some pretty wild ideas the “experts” of the day found not only threatening but crucifixion-worthy. 

Buck refuses to believe the one world government’s lies about the Rapture being alien-related somehow. This leads him into a secret underground world of conspiracy theorists who are the only honest, good, decent people left. 

In addition to directing, Sorbo stars as pilot Rayford Steele. In earlier versions of Left Behind Steele is depicted as a non-believer and cheater who is left behind while his devout wife is raptured. 

Sorbo apparently felt that audiences couldn’t handle the idea of him, or any other hero, behaving in a sinful fashion, cheating, or not believing because while the narrator establishes that Rayford didn’t pay attention at Church and wasn’t the righteous servant the Lord his wife was, Rayford begins the movie clearly a believer. 

Why wouldn’t he be? His wife told him that all the good Christians would be raptured up to heaven and then BOOM all the good Christians disappeared, leaving all of us jackasses behind. 

Sorbo’s selfish unwillingness to play anything less than pious robs his character of any meaningful arc. He’s not a sinful, disbelieving skeptic who discovers God’s love and is transformed. Rayford is instead a man who clearly believes in Jesus and goes from a place of belief to a place of SUPER belief. He goes from being a Christian to being a Super-Christian. 

The Hercules star is equally inept behind the camera and in front of it. In order for Rayford’s journey to register we’d need to not immediately know his path will be. That’s why you need someone like the late musician GG Allin for a role like that.

You need someone who seems like a disgusting, shit-eating, reprehensible monster in a role like that so that his transformation  has an impact. Unfortunately, Allin passed on and consequently was not available for the role so they got someone else.

Accordion to IMDB, this entire production costs less than the three and a half million dollars Nicolas Cage picked up for the 2014 Left Behind. We consequently have a globe-trotting action-adventure epic where the climaxes consist of first Rayford and then Buck accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. 

Left Behind is full of talk and perversely light on action. It takes enormous faith to assume that audiences will suffer through 120 minutes of preaching and propaganda out of a poignant conviction that at some point something exciting will happen in the series.

I saw the only showing of Left Behind in my neighborhood and then because I am a glutton for punishment and was also still high and nobody else left, I sat and watched a taped speech first by Kevin Sorbo and then by his good friend Mike Huckabee about the necessity of serving Jesus and fighting the devil by encouraging people to see Left Behind, more than once if possible. 

After being yelled at cinematically for two hours I then had to endure spiels from men I despise with a white hot burning passion. 

I’m not sure, but I think that legally means that you NEED to sign up for a paid subscription here. Or at least a free one! Throw me a bone here! 

Left Behind is godawful. Sorbo might think he’s got a winning hand but he hasn’t got a prayer.