Diving tale drowns in mediocrity
That a studio exec thought Last Breath might bring in box office dollars is curious. A documentary about the same story, with the same name, by the same filmmaker, came out in 2019. But now, some six years later, in his first feature film, writer/director Alex Parkinson presents a fictionalized version. My guess is that Parkinson wanted to try his hand at feature films, and probably felt that using a story with which he was already familiar would be an easy route into the genre. Unfortunately for us, Parkinson’s maiden attempt at dramatizing previously covered real-life material falls flat.
Last Breath unspools a based-on-a-true-story tale of three divers charged with repairing a pipeline deep under the ocean’s surface in the North Sea. The divers, as written by Parkinson and co-writers Mitchell LaFortune and David Brooks, are more cliches than people. Duncan (Woody Harrelson) is the grizzled, wise veteran on his last dive before retiring. Dave (Simu Liu) is the intimidating, no-nonsense hot shot, and Chris (Finn Cole) is the nervous newbie, trying to excel, but also stay safe for his worried fiance back home (Bobby Rainsbury, wasted in a worried girlfriend role).
The filmmakers spend what feels like almost half the picture’s running time with set up and plodding character introduction. By the time we get to the crisis point of the movie–Chris becomes untethered from the ship ferrying the divers, and has only ten minutes of oxygen left–the story’s slow start has anaesthetized us to the drama. The picture then turns into a race-against-the-clock rescue movie, but that suspense is too little too late.
If you’re still interested in how the story turns out, I won’t spoil it here, in case you’re a sucker for diving movies, and want to check this one out nonetheless. If, however, you’d prefer a far more engaging diving rescue story, I encourage you to watch the 2021 documentary or the 2022 feature film made about the underwater Tham Luang cave rescue. Yes, that true life story was also retold in a feature following a documentary. But the difference between those pictures and Last Breath is that they successfully convey the dramatic intensity and emotion so sorely missing from Parkinson’s inert attempt.
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Last Breath opens in theaters today.
