In 2018, Evangelical missionary John Allen Chau made global headlines when he was killed while trying to spread Christianity to the North Sentinelese—an uncontacted tribe off the eastern Indian coast. The reclusive community is highly protected by the Indian government (in part, due to fear of pathogens wiping them out), so no charges were ever filed and Chau’s body was never recovered. In its absence, he became the topic of several widespread discussions on neocolonialism and Asian American identity, and even his own documentary, National Geographic’s The Mission. As these things usually go, a biopic wasn’t far behind.

Enter director Justin Lin. Although primarily known for the Fast & Furious franchise, Lin originally burst onto the Hollywood scene with the 2002 independent drama Better Luck Tomorrow, whose Sundance premiere drew criticism from one audience member for “misrepresenting” Asian Americans in a negative light, since its characters broke past the prominent overachiever stereotypes, and were instead slackers and criminals. However, critic extraordinaire Roger Ebert famously leapt to the movie’s defense, shouting: “Asian American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be!” It was a watershed moment for how we talk about representation, and it spoke to the complexities of Asian American identity that, at the time, were rarely portrayed on screen. Twenty-three years later, at the Sundance premiere of Last Days, Lin laid out his reasoning for wanting to tackle the tale of an Asian American missionary while working through his feelings on the subject:

“When I first heard (about what happened to Chau), I had a very strong reaction to it. This Asian American face popped up, and of course I was imposing all of my personal issues right on top of that. And the last thing that really affected me was that John Allen Chau was 26 years old, and I was thinking, ‘That is somebody’s son. That is somebody’s brother,’ and it really stuck with me.”

Ironically, where Better Luck Tomorrow expands the possibility of on-screen representation, Last Days limits them. The film is based on the Outside article “The Last Days of John Allen Chau,” and it uses a combination of Chau’s real diary entries and a fictitious Indian police narrative to get to the root of who Chau really was. The problem, however, is that Last Days is seldom concerned with the vast majority of the real-world forces that molded Chau—from his religion, to the colonial structures upholding a western hierarchy—and it often tries to concoct a tale of Asian American outsidership as an impetus for his ill-fated journey.

That Chau’s writings seldom touched on his ethnicity isn’t a problem, per se. He only ever referred to himself as “part Irish, part native American (Choctaw), part African, and part Chinese and southeast Asian,” but biopics have long been vehicles to explore wider cultural issues; The Social Network, for instance, is far more about modern communication than it is about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. However, the issue with Lin’s approach to Last Days is that it presents a much more intriguing story of delusional adventure, which the film then brushes aside in favor of its half-formed tale of a boy searching for some form of belonging that he couldn’t find at home. Chau’s story, though it may draw certain anxieties out of Lin, seems like entirely the wrong medium through which to channel them.

The film begins with snippets of Chau’s fatal expedition, before flashing back and forth (and back again) through a non-linear structure involving the real-time search for Chau (as played by Sky Yang) in Port Blair—a tourist hotspot a few miles from North Sentinel—and the tale of his Vancouver, Washington upbringing and schooling in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Leading the search for the missing American is fictitious Indian policewoman Meera Ganali (Radhika Apte), whose commitment to tracing Chau’s footsteps leads her to his written journal. There is, however, little logistical or emotional impetus for when the movie jumps between past and present. This is usually signaled by Ganali sitting down to read Chau’s words, but these transitional scenes are plonked in at random, and the temporal whiplash between them robs both stories—the unraveling of Chau’s history, and the procedural about his eventual fate—of any and all momentum.

There’s something fanatical about Chau that Yang embodies deftly on occasion: an obsession with spreading his faith to all corners no matter the cost. While on a mission in Kurdistan, he learns to bend the rules to suit his objectives from a pair of death-defying Evangelicals (Toby Wallace and Ciara Bravo), who mount illicit motorcycle rides and cargo flights to drop copies of the Bible and supplies in dangerous areas. During these scenes, the movie briefly starts to resemble one of Lin’s Fast & Furious blockbusters, only with the mantra of “family” replaced by the word of Christ.

There’s something fanatical about Chau that Yang embodies deftly on occasion: an obsession with spreading his faith to all corners no matter the cost.

There’s a free-spirited allure to these moments that Last Days refuses to luxuriate in. The result is that Chau’s fanaticism is never quite convincing, nor is it ever repulsive enough in the movie’s framing to elicit a strong reaction. It mostly sits in a lukewarm middle ground, resulting in a narrative on auto-pilot, rather than one that uses a discernable dramatic point-of-view to engage its audience.

The film does, on occasion, try to use Ganali as both an audience avatar and a framing device, but when viewers have shown up to watch a movie about John Allen Chau, the personal life of a made up policewoman is a far less interesting prospect—especially when much of her dialogue functions only to hold Chau to account, and elaborate on the dangers he posed to the tribe. This didacticism is further exacerbated the more we learn about Ganali, and the way her own feelings of outsidership and persecution mirror how she views not only Chau, but the Sentinelese. However, this drama-by-proxy renders Chau as mysterious as the subjects of his conversion, despite Last Days attempting to paint a multifaceted picture of the American missionary.

The film has a remarkable supporting cast, including Lost alums Naveen Andrews as Ganali’s sluggish boss and Ken Leung as Chau’s Chinese immigrant father. But both characters’ main function is to gesture towards Ganali and Chau’s ongoing stories and feeling of un-belonging, without either shedding further light on them, or truly exacerbating them. This is, in microcosm, the film’s pervading flaw: it’s a drama in stasis, wherein Yang’s performance is the only facet containing any kind of meaningful evolution. Which is to say: he slips further down a rabbit hole the movie refuses to investigate.

By the time it reaches its inevitable, deadly climax, it even has a minor character—a fellow foreigner living in India—tell Chau that no matter if he succeeds, people back home will still think of him as a “Ch*nk,” forcing him to reflect on his apparent motives. While these feelings of isolation may be true to Lin’s experience (the director has spoken about having this slur hurled in his direction), it matches neither what’s known about the real Chau, nor the version of him that ends up on-screen. In the process of trying to craft a film about Asian Americanness, Last Days ends up imposing this identity where it doesn’t belong—an ironic fate for the story of John Allen Chau.