At the 2002 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Justin Lin’s directorial debut “Better Luck Tomorrow,” Roger Ebert famously stood up in the audience to chastise an audience member for questioning whether it was irresponsible for Lin to depict Asian-Americans as criminals. Back at the festival two decades and five “Fast & Furious” movies later, Lin is unlikely to see the same level of fiery passion from anyone attending his latest film, “Last Days.”
Another exploration of identity, responsibility, and the missteps young people tend to make while finding themselves, “Last Days” is based on a thorny and fascinating true story: that of John Allen Chau, the 26-year-old American missionary who was killed in 2018 after kayaking to the remote North Sentinel Island to spread Christianity to a local tribe. Yet all the promise of this premise is squandered in Lin’s adaptation, which in style and structure hews to hackneyed convention at every turn.
After a brief overture flashing forward to this sad event, the movie rewinds to follow John (Sky Yang) as he nears graduation from his Christian college. His father (Ken Leung of “Industry”) is determined for John to become a doctor, even gifting him a stethoscope after his graduation ceremony. But John feels drawn to the path God has planned for him — whatever that might be — and he’s pretty sure medical school isn’t part of it. So when a family crisis presents an opportunity for John to break away and begin missionary work, he boards a plane and never looks back.
The remainder of the movie takes the form of a parallel-action drama, flipping between dual timelines: John’s peregrinations as a missionary in his early 20s; and the race to locate John in the days leading up to his visit to North Sentinel Island. The latter events center not on John but on a fictional player in the saga: Meera (Radhika Apte), an intrepid Indian officer trying to stop John from embarking on his treacherous journey and imposing his ideology upon the Sentinelese, if only she can get past the professional hurdles set by her ludicrously patronizing superior officer (Naveen William Sidney Andrews). (As if a time traveler from the midcentury, the superior officer at one point refers to Meera as “an ambitious lady cop.”)
The fact that Meera’s storyline even exists within the framework of “Last Days” should trigger alarm bells and a knowing eye-roll. This is the Hollywoodized version of John’s story: a saccharine and souped-up spectacle that totally eclipses any of the thought-provoking complexity of the true events at its core. As Meera — the film’s ostensible hero — races against the clock to locate John, the screenplay also steamrolls her into her own tale of marginalized identity, a B-plot shoehorned in solely to bolster her affinity with the Sentinelese she’s hoping to shield from John’s obtrusion.
The John sections cover a much broader timeframe, hopping among a handful of his experiences as a missionary and explorer across the globe. A significant portion takes place in Kurdistan, where John first meets Chandler (a magnetic Toby Wallace), a fellow missionary operating on a more radical agenda. To John, Chandler acts as both a revolutionary mentor and an understanding pal, offering a valuable sense of alliance and purpose that fills a void within John he didn’t even know was there. Chandler is one of several side characters John encounters on his journey who stand in for the hoards of people who encouraged him, either explicitly or implicitly, to pursue North Sentinel as a holy grail.
To that end, the film’s best sequence is also its most harrowing: It finds John participating in an American missionary boot camp. The scenes follow John and his young cohorts as they trudge through remote woods in search of shelter, before a band of training camp leaders wielding spears and speaking a fake foreign language capture them and physically beat them into submission. In real life, the boot camp John attended was run by an organization called All Nations; in 2018 the international executive leader of the group said that John was “one of the best participants in this experience that we have ever had.”
The scenes at the boot camp are get-under-your-skin disturbing in a way that the rest of “Last Days” can only aspire to be. They gesture at a wider world in which preaching the gospel and spreading Christian ideology are, for certain zealots, more vital than physical and mental safety. It’s easy to see how John, an adventurer by nature seeking his greater purpose, could have been sucked into what he saw as a chance to please God and make something of himself in the world.
The movie’s incessant urge to psychoanalyze John’s fanaticism could have stopped at the boot camp sequence. Instead, “Last Days” ironically succumbs to its own form of conservatism. Its storytelling is straightforward, familiar, and even didactic, culminating in a dime-store Freudian sequence which flashes back to a moment from John’s childhood in which his father wins a painting contest at a local fair. It finds John, as a toddler, wandering around the fair grounds alone, crying as he looks for his parents. Even AI couldn’t dream up a more literal depiction of a boy whose primary trouble is that he’s lost, scared, and looking for love.
Grade: C-
“Last Days” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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