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| B- B- B- | |
| Review by Xibo | Date seen: February 3, 2001 |
| Viewing Location: 42nd St AMC Empire 25, NYC | Grade: B- |
| Summary: Setting new standards in christian movies... er... | |
| I guess that's not necessarily a good thing, if the old standard was the epic films of "The Ten Commandments" and "Ben Hur" from the 50's... so here we are, a half-century later, and we get a low-budget flick that was obviously rushed through production. I thought that with Left Behind being such a best-seller and all, that this would have been a "major motion picture". But obvious it isn't. I don't recall seeing ANY trailers for this, it just appeared at the theaters this weekend, unannounced. Surprise!
The cast is okay. The only name in the cast, Kirk Cameron, is the worst performer in the whole bunch. The guy playing Nicolae, Gordon Currie, did a great job and I hope he develops a career outside of "christian film". Sadly this movie turns christian filmmaking into a real minority niche product, instead of the blockbuster epics of yesteryear. The movie also suffers from the same problems the book series does; none of the books really accomplish anything, and the story dragged out through several books. I guess the "goal" here is to release several movies. Obviously with the low-budget method they're using, they can certainly do so; as long as the fans of the books see the film, I'm sure they'll make enough money to keep making more (although they may have to get released direct to video...). In New York, of course, there aren't that many die-hard christians, since we have so many jews, muslims, hindi, athiests, and so forth... the movie did play to a semi-full theater, but many in the audience booed the ending. But honestly it wasn't that bad, and compared to the other end-of-the-world stuff out there, it compared okay, although it played much more like a TV movie than a film. | |
"I should put quotes here."