Last Breath tells the story of the miraculous journey to save a diver on a mission gone wrong. It’s one of those schlocky survival thriller films with an ending about as obvious as its dialogue and without a clear sense of artistic style. With two pretty big names attached to it without a whole lot to do on their own and a story that’s about as generic as it can get, this is the quintessential February release: a film without much to keep it memorable but just enough action to be moderately exciting.
Last Breath Review
Adapted from the 2019 documentary of the same name, Last Breath is a recreation of a 2012 diving accident far larger than life. If you weren’t aware, large oil lines run through the ocean’s depths (some up to 1,000 feet deep, according to the film’s overlong opening text). To keep that oil running and keep nations powered, brave divers go on missions to maintain them once a year. These divers are the subject of our story.
The least notable of the three stars, Finn Cole, takes on the role of the stranded diver, Chris Lemons. While on a mission with David Yuasa (who has been inexplicably race-swapped to be played by Simu Liu), Chris has his protective cord severed, leaving him stranded at the bottom of the ocean with a limited amount of oxygen as David, Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), and a crew of boring boatsmen go on a seemingly doomed mission to save him.
If you’ve seen the trailer for this, you know exactly how it goes. Even if you sit for the first five minutes, you can make a pretty solid prediction of how it’ll all play out. As Chris runs out of oxygen and fights for his life, the mission seems to get even more challenging to complete. Will the crew be able to make the audacious journey to save the young diver (who’s about to get married, to add insult to injury)? I’ll leave you to predict that yourself.
Alex Parkinson, who also directed the documentary, takes a directorial approach that keeps the film from feeling particularly fresh. He, unfortunately, uses the lens of a documentarian to tell this story and adds in too many generic emotional beats. There’s a ridiculous scene where Chris’s wife (MyAnna Buring) explains that it’s extraordinary that he can go on these diving missions and that their love is extraordinary, too! It’s just the type of nauseatingly saccharine dialogue that makes this feel so basic.
Woody Harrelson is surprisingly decent here. He spends half of the film lounging around in pajama pants with an unshaven appearance, making it glaringly apparent that the crew wanted to keep him as comfortable as possible at the expense of making him seem here for anything but a check. However, a few key emotional scenes show the side of Harrelson who was Oscar-nominated eight short years ago.
Simu Liu hasn’t been able to appear in almost anything good since skyrocketing in fame in the titular role in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and this film is just another example of why he hasn’t found much more success. It’s clear that he has some acting capability, but Parkinson’s direction, combined with the script from Parkinson and two other scribes, leaves his character feeling like a placeholder for somebody more interesting.
Finn Cole is pretty great, though. It’s always lame when a film hides the lead and the best actor behind two more prominent names who aren’t up to much. He nicely plays the role of the diver in a desperate fight for his life, and if he were given more agency as a character, he would’ve stood out a lot more.
While on the mission, we also follow a crew on the boat manning the mission, but they’re all a little lame. Cliff Curtis is pretty good as the captain. They often feel a little distracting in the grand scheme of things, but they almost certainly played a much bigger role in the real-life mission than the film plays them up to be.
Is Last Breath worth watching?
At 90 minutes long, this is a pretty brisk watch. The action is directed reasonably well, and by the end, there is some genuine excitement that this writer had admittedly written off as impossible to achieve. It gets pretty emotional and hits a good climax around the 70-minute mark.
Then, it meanders slightly as we get the inevitably stupid and obvious conclusion. It would be a much better film if this were about 10 minutes shorter. It feels a lot weaker after wasting our time with a boring conclusion.
Even though Last Breath is a generic survival/thriller that seems destined to fall into obscurity, it’s hard to deny that it’s an exciting film at points. Parkinson knows the story very well and can weave together this larger-than-life story and draw every piece of tension out of it. You might be on the edge of your seat for almost all of the second act. You might even let out a cheer at one point. Isn’t that what the movies are all about? It’s unlikely you’ll walk out of this theater feeling like your life has changed, but this might make you feel excited, and that’s almost certainly worth the price of a ticket.
Last Breath is in theaters nationwide on February 28.
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