Last Days: Justin Lin's Frustrating Return to Indies After Two Decades

Justin Lin came back to Sundance after 23 years of directing Fast & Furious movies, and you can feel every one of those blockbuster years weighing down Last Days. This is a filmmaker who once stood up Roger Ebert with "Better Luck Tomorrow," now delivering a missionary biopic that feels like it was directed by committee – which is particularly disappointing given its fascinating true story about John Allen Chau's fatal attempt to convert the isolated Sentinelese tribe.

The film can't decide what it wants to be. Is it a tragedy about religious extremism? A character study of indoctrination? An action thriller? Lin tries for all three and achieves none. Sky Yang does his best as Chau, bringing genuine conviction to a role that the script refuses to properly explore. We get flashbacks to his childhood, montages of his missionary training, parallel timelines of his final journey – everything except actual insight into what drove this man to kayak to his death.

The most frustrating addition is a fictional Indian police officer played by Radhika Apte, racing to stop Chau before he reaches the island. This invented subplot feels like studio notes incarnate, as if someone decided the real story wasn't commercial enough. Naveen Andrews shows up as her cartoonishly sexist boss who literally calls her "an ambitious lady cop" – dialogue that feels transported from a 1980s TV movie.

Lin's action background only surfaces in the opening sequence, where Chau's first encounter with the Sentinelese unfolds with kinetic camerawork that briefly reminds you this director knows how to stage tension. But then we're back to plodding biographical beats and heavy-handed symbolism about trains and progress. There's a kernel of a great film here about the collision between faith and isolation, but Lin seems terrified of actually engaging with the moral complexity of his subject.

The film's ultimate sin is its cowardice. It refuses to condemn Chau's actions (which endangered an entire indigenous population) or understand them. Instead, it offers platitudes about following your dreams and finding your purpose. For a story about a man who died trying to force his beliefs on others, that's inexcusable.