Before a single frame of footage rolls in Justin Lin’s “Last Days,” voiceover narration establishing the protagonist’s demise asks its central question: “Who was John Chau?” It’s a valid one to pose, given the mystery surrounding a 26-year-old Christian missionary slain by the remote tribe to whom he felt called to convert. But this should have been the first line of inquisition in the film—not the last.
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If people are nothing more than the sum of their actions, then the enigma of John Chau (Sky Yang) should be solved within this dutiful recreation of his path to perishing. Screenwriter Ben Ripley does not betray the journalistic source of his script, reconstructing a chronology of John’s four-year journey from his initial call to missionary service at Oral Roberts University to his doomed mission of reaching the remote North Sentinelese people with the gospel. Lin keeps the scenes moving at a nice clip, a necessary feature for a story moving toward an already-known ending as the character’s Christian conviction deepens and hardens.
One structural gambit of “Last Days” that works— at least for a time—is the parallel quest of Indian sub-inspector Meera (Radhika Apte) as she tries to stop John once she realizes his ambitions to embark on a dangerous mission. Learning about someone’s true self from the people they leave behind is a tried and true tactic dating back to “Citizen Kane,” and it helps yield some insightful moments of characters trying to absolve themselves for their role in enabling him. However, Ripley never succeeds at making her a lawful good analog to John as she battles against stagnant institutions to try and save lives in her own way.
However, that built-in reflectiveness is insufficient for “Last Days,” keeping it as mere exploration rather than true explanation. Everything in the film is just as it appears on the surface. Characters speak without subtext, and each scene is little more than a building block toward a predetermined outcome. It’s streamlined like a ChatGPT summary of John’s life, primarily concerned with iterating an output within a set of digestible median outcomes.
What’s missing from “Last Days” is a tougher but necessary line of questioning: why? Why would a promising young man forego medical school to pursue a vocation in ministry? Why would someone put their life at such imminent risk in the name of evangelizing their religion? Why would someone be susceptible to a reading of the Bible that overlaps so neatly with colonialism?
The film often relies on a title card and time jump to do the heavy lifting of showing Alex’s emboldening. It’s too incurious to gloss over the obvious follow-ups from its primary line of investigation. The film has no answers because Lin plays it more like a heist film—where the bounty is the purity of the unexposed North Sentinelese—than a sincere human drama about faith and identity. Lin entertains as a result but struggles to enlighten.
“Last Days” is scared of tackling Christianity with any nuance. Ripley would rather make a half-hearted suggestion that John’s real woe lies in daddy issues with his taciturn father Patrick (Ken Leung) than tackle his spirituality with anything more than the deployment of a Bible verse. This approach is designed to aggravate believers and skeptics alike. The apathetic treatment comes across like a PureFlix faith-based movie written by someone with no knowledge of the religion.
This might explain why Toby Wallace, the rising Australian actor who crackles like a lightning bolt each time he graces the screen, manages to inject so much life into “Last Days.” As Chandler, a friend Alex makes as he immerses himself in the more powerfully proselytizing arm of Christianity, he’s the only character who can articulate anything remotely resembling a religious philosophy. For him, Christ’s call to mission is meant to be hard and frustrating. He provides a glimpse at a subculture of believers who see themselves as the new counterculture, but only when Chandler commands the frame does this setting become subject rather than backdrop.
Chandler elucidates in small lines the internal compass that serves as a guiding light for true believers gripped in the throes of zealotry. If only “Last Days” could locate something similar inside itself. Lin didn’t need to go as deep into the story as Jesse Moss’ “The Mission,” a 2023 documentary about John Allen Chau that probes deeply into the missionary mindset that pushed him toward such an extreme action. But there’s something fundamentally incongruous about portraying a complex subject through such a simple, single-minded focus on ease of watchability that he never resolves. [C]
