‘Last Days’ Review: Justin Lin’s Superficial Portrait of a Missionary’s Tragic Demise

In 2018, 26-year-old American evangelical missionary John Allen Chau went on the most dangerous mission of his life. He secretly journeyed to North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in an attempt to convert its small population to Christianity, despite their strident insistence on staying disconnected from the rest of the world. As he tried to make contact with the people of the island, he was killed by arrows. His body was never recovered.

Now, Justin Lin’s Last Days seeks out to provide a coherent characterization of the young evangelical. Chau (Sky Yang) is presented in this misaligned attempt at character-based drama as an over-eager obsessive who never knew how to exercise caution or stop proclaiming his passion for Jesus to the world. A passionate evangelical from a comfortable California suburb, he doesn’t appear to have ever had or wanted any other profession than carrying the gospel to people in far corners of the Earth who he worries will be consigned to hell otherwise.

Chau is surrounded by people who share that belief, from the barnstorming born-again Chandler (Toby Wallace), who straps Bibles into packets of food aid being dropped into remote Kurdistan and sneers at normie Christians, to the preacher at Chau’s college who warns about the unsaved souls “hurtling into the Christ-less night.” Given that encouragement, it’s little wonder that a lost kid like Chau hurtles ahead into danger.

Instead of delving into what lay behind Chau’s recklessness, though, Ben Ripley’s screenplay scatters itself across multiple plot angles that confuse more than clarify. The film’s opening and arguably most effective scene shows Chau kayaking toward his fateful encounter with the North Sentinel islanders. He appears overwhelmed by the reality of his mission to the point where he almost loses the power of language. Lin shoots the scene mostly close-in, heightening Chau’s initial exuberance and then terror as the islanders, seen only as wary and indistinct armed figures on the beach, start firing arrows that crack past the camera with a horrifying immediacy.

Following that, Last Days splits into a pair of narratives. These illustrate a lot but explain little. The first is a string of gorgeously shot flashbacks that track Chau from graduation through the various missionary postings and backpacking sojourns. These don’t satisfy his taste for adventure, instead spurring him on toward the islanders, who as one of the last uncontacted people on Earth became an obsession with fringier Christian missionaries.

Like in much of the rest of Last Days, this section focuses more on flash than substance, failing somehow to include any scenes of Chau actually trying to convert people or engaging in dialogue that could help explicate his motivations. While the flashbacks do illuminate the tension between Chau and his father (Ken Leung), the film takes things too far by unconvincingly trying to use that fraught relationship as a rationale for the son’s dangerous wanderlust.

The second and largely unnecessary narrative shows an Indian detective, Meera (Radhika Apte), in the port that Chau used as a base for getting to North Sentinel Island trying to track him down. Despite a ham-fisted attempt to connect her intensity with Chau’s, the frenzy of her investigation, which includes her scrapping with a cynical superior (Naveen Andrews) while hiding a personal secret, rapidly diverges from any connection with the film’s primary story and seems only placed there to include scenes where cops run around and bark at people.

Purposeless as these particular sequences may be, you still sense that Lin feels in his wheelhouse whipping them up. The filmmaker recently left the purgatory of the Fast & Furious franchise behind him, and while he likely set out to craft a serious character-based drama with Last Days, the film isn’t well served by his haphazard and distractingly busy execution, to the point that Last Days ends up just as shallow as, say, F9 and making little narrative sense.

Was Chau motivated by selfless martyrdom, arrogant imperialism, quasi-suicide, or some combination of the three? While there may not ever be a clear answer, this story was already studied with far greater depth, nuance, and drama in Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s documentary The Mission. Last Days is ostensibly trying to understand what drove Chau toward his death. But by the end of the film, many viewers will be no closer to having an answer.