Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu star in this dramatization of the documentary of the same name.
PLOT: A diver (Finn Cole) is trapped 100 meters under the sea with no light, heat and only thirty minutes of breathable oxygen – leaving his two colleagues (Simu Liu and Woody Harrelson) with only a short window of time to save him.
REVIEW: Last Breath is a dramatization of a 2019 documentary by Alex Parkinson. The documentary used footage recorded on body cams to depict the harrowing deep sea rescue of a diver who became trapped when conducting repairs on a pipeline 330 feet below the surface of the North Sea. Parkinson has returned to direct the feature version, and it’s a taut, lean, true-to-life thriller that proves to be an immersive experience for viewers.
Running a no-nonsense ninety minutes, Parkinson’s film wastes no time getting to the meat of the story, with much of the rescue taking place in real-time. It’s extremely well-photographed, scored and edited and boasts three solid leads in Simu Liu, Woody Harrelson, and Finn Cole.
Given the nature of the story, next to no time is spent on character development, with only the bare bones of each filled in within the film’s first fifteen minutes. Cole’s Chris Lemons is a young diver on one of his deep sea jobs who’s eager to return to his fiancee. Harrelson is his mentor, a seasoned diver who’s on the verge of being pushed out of his job due to his age. At the same time, Simu Liu is a cold, no-nonsense fellow diver everyone calls “The Vulcan” due to the fact that he never shows emotion, or talks much about his personal life.
Of course, when things go awry, it’s left to the old pro and the steely professional to get things done, but the movie is careful to present everything that happened under the sea as a freak accident, with no real blame assigned to anyone. In fact, the film takes pains to show that while Liu and Harrelson’s characters were the ones who had to put themselves in physical danger to rescue their friend, the crew of the ship supporting them played a crucial role. A lack of selfishness and a team mentality ultimately prevented a tragedy.
While some may take issue with the meat-and-potatoes vibe of the film, I appreciated how lean it was. It gets the job done without any preamble and is so immersive that you actually feel like you’re in on the dive with them at times. It’s too bad this wasn’t shot with IMAX cameras, as that format would have lent itself well to the movie they’re making. It’s certainly one I regret having seen on a screener link, and it would no doubt play really well in a top-notch theatre.
The cast is terrific, with Harrelson bringing a lot of humanity to his role as the kind of old pro who doesn’t want his career to end with a tragedy. He’s ably contrasted by Simu Liu, whose character, while initially cold and distant, turns out to be precisely the kind of guy you want around when things go south. With his imposing physique and charisma, you really do wonder why Hollywood hasn’t made more use of him in movies, especially if you consider that Shang-Chi was a pretty solid performer for a movie that came out during the pandemic.
While Last Breath isn’t getting a massive build-up and comes out at a fairly dead time of the year, it’s well worth checking out theatrically if you want a realistic, fact-based thriller. It’s perfectly cast and well-directed by Parkinson, who clearly aimed to be as faithful to his documentary as possible.
