Finn Cole, Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu in Last Breath.Mark Cassar/Courtesy of Focus Features
- Last Breath
- Directed by Alex Parkinson
- Written by Mitchell LaFortune, David Brooks and Alex Parkinson
- Starring Finn Cole, Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu
- Classification PG; 95 minutes
- Opens in theatres Feb. 28
If your Instagram algorithm is as peculiarly adventurous as mine, you might often be fed short, utterly terrifying videos of people involved in “extreme” occupations: oil-rig workers welding pipes while battling 20-foot waves, Arctic fishermen nearly drowning while trying to unload the day’s catch, daredevils who climb 100-foot electricity poles to perform maintenance. While each and every scenario provides pure, unfiltered nightmare fuel, my eyes cannot help but consistently linger on the clips, hypnotized by the high-risk, high-reward labour. It helps, of course, that it is all being delivered to me while I’m safely ensconced on my couch, the biggest threat to my own personal safety being the distance needed to travel to the fridge.
It is a little surprising, then, that Instagram’s algorithm hasn’t also inundated me with ads for Last Breath, a new survival-of-the-fittest drama that follows a trio of “saturation divers” who work 300 feet beneath the surface of the North Sea to repair pipelines. A ticking-clock thriller that combines elements of Apollo 13, The Perfect Storm, and the handful of movies to come out of the 2018 Thai cave rescue, Last Breath seeks to recreate the intensity of working a life-or-death job – albeit in feature-length form, rather than bite-sized social-media clips. Which is where the film’s minor but copious flaws float to the surface.
Adapting his own 2019 documentary of the same name, director Alex Parkinson has an excellent handle on the logistical details of the perilous work: the expertise needed, the manpower required, the mere seconds that it can take for a gig to go sideways. But the filmmaker struggles to tether all the technicalities to the human drama needed to make the endeavour relatable to us landlubbers. There is a brief attempt made at the very opening of the film, in which we briefly glimpse the tidy domestic life of Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), a young diver with a beautiful fiancée at home. Presumably, Chris also has a taste for adventure that simply cannot be quenched by even the most comfortable of homes – although Parkinson’s script never makes clear exactly what drives Chris to risk his life over and over again during month-long missions.
We learn even less about Chris’s colleagues, both of whom fit neatly into stock types: Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), the grizzled veteran who is being pushed out of his job, and David Yuasa (Simu Liu), the taciturn pro who never cracks a smile. By the time that Chris is left stranded at the bottom of the sea, the cord attaching his diving suit to his colleagues’ vessel accidentally snapping owing to a combination of rough weather and equipment malfunction, Parkinson devises a rescue operation whose outcome lacks any emotional weight. Sure, we all want the guy to survive because he is an innocent human being and we’re not heartless monsters, but beyond that, audiences are left as adrift as poor, oxygen-deprived Chris.
The underwater cinematography, orchestrated by Nick Remy Matthews, is often startling, writes Barry Hertz.Jon Borg/Courtesy of Focus Features
At least the curiously assembled international cast – which includes New Zealand star Cliff Curtis as the captain of the divers’ ship – are as committed to the script as their characters are to their outrageous mission. Harrelson, by this point in his career a master of chewing the most blasé of dialogue and spitting out something remarkable, emerges the strongest of the central trio. Although it’s not exactly a heated contest, given that Cole spends most of his time unconscious and Liu is barely allowed more than a single character beat until the film’s very end (a reveal that doesn’t land as poignantly as Parkinson and his co-writers might think).
The underwater cinematography, orchestrated by Nick Remy Matthews, is often startling, destined to make the dark box of a movie theatre all that more engagingly claustrophobic. And the ultimate story behind Last Breath is incredible, verging on the unbelievable – especially as it pivots around a wild scientific mystery that is all but waved away by the script. But the film’s intermittent thrills don’t end up offering that much more than, say, a random flick through my social-media history. When’s that danger pay kick in, again?
