The new and (slightly) improved ‘Last Days’

This process of tweaking films between their festival bows and public arrivals isn’t uncommon, though they rarely result in radical changes—as is the case with Lin’s biopic. Both cuts of the movie run 120 minutes, and they feature the exact same sequence of events, but the version shown to the public arrives with renewed focus that warrants re-appraisal, even if Last Days is unlikely to find success. The story begins with John’s arrival on North Sentinel Island off the eastern Indian coast, where his earnest (but recklessly egotistical) Bible-thumping is met with a hail of arrows. The rest of the film flashes back and traces John’s life as a missionary-in-training right up until his ill-fated mission, but the story it tells feels slightly different beneath the surface, if only because of which characters and subplots now have the lion’s share of the screentime.

Lin, best known for directing several Fast & Furious movies, also directed the Sundance crime indie Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), which was loosely based on the murder of Chinese American teenager Stuart Tay a decade prior, by his coconspirators in a computer heist. The film touches several vectors of Asian American identity, including the lofty expectations placed on so-called overachievers. For Lin, who’s spent decades making action films at the studio level, Last Days marks a return to using a real tragedy as a mirror to several issues and anxieties surrounding Asian American-ness, though it’s hard to say whether John’s story was the right outlet. Both versions of the film gesture towards his outsidership in the United States, but the dialogue framing him as such tends to take place in his absence, between various Indian police officers tasked with finding him.

The lives of these fictitious cop characters are etched with a similar purpose. One of them, sub-inspector Meera (Radhika Apte), the driven lead investigator on John’s case, is a closeted lesbian who finds uncanny kinship when she reads his journal, but the movie stretches thematic incredulity when she also ties her and John’s feelings of isolation to the Sentinelese, who also just want to live in peace. These flailing attempts at emotional coherence still don’t work since they’re reduced to haphazard, fleeting dialogue, and they feel even more appendiceal in the new edit, given their reduced significance. Meera, for instance, seems to enter and leave the frame far more quickly. However, this may actually be a worthwhile sacrifice that helps rescue the movie to some degree.

In the new cut, pacing seems to play a much greater part in the story than before, especially when scenes of John are inter-cut with those of his father, the disgraced Chinese American surgeon Patrick Chau (Ken Leung). The film’s attention often falls on quiet moments of Patrick reflecting on his parentage while his son is half way around the world. He often wonders if the way he raised him—and his lack of intervention, the more John strayed towards the light of Evangelicalism—might lead to certain doom.

With the oft-perturbed Leung as a more significant presence, the film now becomes emotionally anchored in questions of the Christian missionary ethos, a belief system from which Patrick is distanced. This is filtered further through the aging doctor’s intense remorse, as though he’s already lost his son. John may not have died yet, but there’s a chance he may be too far gone, and Patrick is the only one who can sense it. This tale of fathers and sons is molded through alternating scenes of both men feeling lost in their own way: as an immigrant father, and as a follower of Christ on an impossible mission that removes him from himself, and from other people.

Scenes of John’s interactions with his fellow missionaries, while still highly expositional, seem to propel the film forward much quicker, and with a sense of danger and inevitability, as though his adventurous desires—born from his devotion to spreading the gospel—are a form of ill-advised madness. In didactic terms: this new version of the film seems to more directly hold John and his belief system to account for the risk he poses, but this isn’t what makes the theatrical cut of Last Days work better, per se.

Rather, these top-down concerns of zealotry become far less tethered to questions of John finding himself and his place in the world. Instead, they help cement the notion that there exists some element of spirituality that John ignores in favor of his chosen faith. Namely: John and his father seem to share a deep connection that extends beyond geographical boundaries, and perhaps even physical explanations, as though Patrick can feel his son’s anguish at his lowest moments. When John feels lost, so too does his father, a story subtly told through the way this version cuts between them in moments of denouement. When John finally succumbs to his fate, it wakes his father up to the reality of his failings halfway across the world.

The bitter irony of this story is now the idea that while John spent so long chasing the love of one phantom father—the one made known to him through scripture—his deep connection to his actual father was one that neither man would end up fully pursuing or exploring. This is the ultimate tragedy of Last Days as it now exists: it’s the tale of an Asian American son and his immigrant father, two withdrawn and emotionally stunted men raised in remarkably different religious and cultural contexts, to the point of being severed from one another. The film still never approaches greatness, but this re-telling unearths a more specific tale of Asian American identity without imposing it quite so forcefully onto one of persecuted indigenous tribes—what was once a bitter irony for a film about a Christian missionary. Instead, this saga of AA+PI belonging becomes rooted in more spiritual musings, even if it fails to overcome its more fundamental flaw of trying to do too many things at once.