Title: Last Breath
Describe This Movie Using One Raising Arizona Quote:
GALE: God damn it! You never leave a man behind!
Brief Plot Synopsis: Documentary filmmaker returns to traumatize us again.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 3 Cracker’s The Golden Age out of 5.
Tagline: “Make every breath count.”
Better Tagline: “As always, fuck the ocean.”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: When a system malfunction causes the North Sea diving support vessel Tharos to drift in a powerful storm, it drags two divers away from their pipeline work area and snaps the tether supplying air, hot water and power to Chris Lemons (Finn Cole). Now Chris’s fellow divers Duncan Allcox (Woody Harrelson) and David Yuasa (Simu Liu), as well as the crew of the Tharos, must somehow rescue the young man, who’s trapped 100 meters down with only ten minutes of reserve air left in his tanks.
“Critical” Analysis: Commercial diving is itself one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, and less than 10 percent of those are what they call “saturation divers.” *Those* divers use a combination of hot water wetsuits, an oxygen-helium breathing mix, and pressurized habitation modules to work for extended periods up to two thousand feet below the surface.
If even the thought of deep water gives you the heebie jeebies, you may want to give Last Breath a pass. Based on director Alex Parkinson and Richard da Costa’s 2019 documentary about the nightmarish 2012 incident that took place off the coast of Scotland, the movie recreates those circumstances in detailed and often harrowing fashion.
Parkinson sets the stage in familiar fashion: Chris is newly engaged to Moragh (Bobby Rainsbury), and they’re building a house! Worse, he’s friendly with the crew and pretty well-liked! Throw in that Allcox is literally going on his last dive before retirement and this has all the makings of a Hot Shots! sequel
The lead-up to the eventual incident focuses heavily on the amount of technical prep and painstaking attention to detail that goes into these operations. That same complexity, not coincidentally, emphasizes how fast things can go sideways.
Last Breath is a “dramatic reenactment” of the 2019 documentary (a la how Little Dieter Needs to Fly became Rescue Dawn), and effectively recaptures the tension and desperate horror of that situation. Parkinson wisely pulls back from the sea floor drama to focus on the efforts to recover him. From Duncan (on his last dive!) to Dave (the hotshot No. 1 diver) to the Tharos crew (MyAnna Buring, Mark Bonnar, and Cliff Curtis among them) everyone works their butts off to bring Chris home.
And as always, some things are tweaked for dramatic effect, and not just the name of the boat. Simu Liu’s David is much more … human than his real-life counterpart, who was not infrequently referred to as a “sociopath” in the documentary, including saying, “shit happens” when Chris was stranded.
His depiction here is like trying to paint the uniquely corrupt FIFA president Sepp Blatter as a moral crusader in United Passions. Liu gives us a more sympathetic portrayal, even if Parkinson makes this point with a sledge hammer when a jeweler’s tool would have sufficed.
Harrelson is really the focus, as Duncan alternates between desperation and duty, realizing as time ticks by that Chris’s chances of survival are dwindling, yet refusing to give up.
The final third suffers, unfortunately, as Parkinson drags the denouement out to the point where very little actually happens. Maybe some beefier character development on the front end would mitigate this, as Chris is the only person we learn anything about.
As Dad Movies go, this is still a good one. It doesn’t hurt that Allcox’s nickname is “Fat Daddy,” or that Dad Movie stalwart Curtis (whom I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven for Uncle Bully) is captain of the Tharos, or that the entire rescue effort is basically surrogate fathers trying to get their son back. What I’m saying is, I can definitely see myself falling asleep on the couch to this some Sunday in the future.
Last Breath is in theaters today.
