Last Breath
Last Breath
Starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole, Cliff Curtis
Directed by Alex Parkinson
Working as saturation divers working to maintain undersea gas lines in the North Sea, Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), David Yuasa (Simu Liu) and Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) put their lives on the line to participate in one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. While David and Chris go to work on an undersea gas line manifold, Duncan remains in the diving bell to keep communication and supplies open. On the surface, the main boat suffers a malfunction that causes the ship to drift away, and David and Chris have to hurry to the diving bell before they get stuck.
Chris's umbilical cord gets caught, and is about to break. David tells Chris that he needs to go to his reserve oxygen so he can stay above the manifold so they could find him, but he will have to leave Chris there alone. Heading back up, Chris has ten minutes of oxygen left, leaving Duncan, David, and the crew of the ship very little time to rescue him.
"Last Breath" works better as a documentary than an actual film, because you get a deeper sense of who these real men were and the real danger Chris faced - enduring 35 minutes underwater with no oxygen - and how this miracle ended with not just Chris surviving, but facing no mental or physical impairments. The film does a great job at establishing the tension and suspense, but knowing the outcome already it's not really that death-defying on screen, but the documentary gives a deeper sense of dread and wonder - how did Chris manage to survive so long without air and, more importantly, survive with no issues whatsoever?
Those questions are never fully answered in either medium, but sometimes things like this defy explanation. The movie's cinematography excels when you're focused on Chris's quest for survival, but meanders its way through the rest of the plot. We don't get to know these characters in any real capacity other than their caricatures - Duncan is the gruff but lovable leader who makes light of every situation and eases tensions (something Woody Harrelson excels at anyway); David is the stoic, firm, no-nonsense worker who thinks logically and not emotionally (an interesting leap for Simu Liu, but again terribly underwritten), and Chris is the damsel in distress who everyone is worried about and, apart from having a fiancee who worries about him, also doesn't offer anything deeper to his character (although Finn Cole does great physical work).
The film feels like a padded runtime movie that could've been expanded by giving the people more to work with and a deeper backstory, but the majority of the film centers on getting Chris out alive, and this is done by the crew on the main ship, leaving Harrelson and Liu absent for most of the film without us knowing what's going through their heads. Cliff Curtis leads the rescue mission but also is relegated to his role as the ship's captain, and the crew is like the crew of the USS Enterprise as they try different ways to get Chris out alive.
Still, the heart of the film is there, as you experience the horrors and fears Chris endured being stuck underwater with no oxygen, thanks to cinematographers Nick Remy Matthews and Ian Seabrook that makes you heavily invested in the rescue, making you at times think they won't actually accomplish it - and that's a great strength that this otherwise meandering movie does extremely well - but I'd still say watch the documentary instead.
The Score: B+
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