Review
By Colton Gomez | 03/21/25 | 10:59 P.M. Mountain Time
Drama | Rated PG-13 | 1 hr 33 min | "Last Breath" Release Date: February 28, 2025
“Last Breath” (2025) is director Alex Parkinson’s film adaptation of his documentary “Last Breath” (2019) which he co-directed with Richard da Costa. It seems much of the same team from the documentary hopped over to help make the film version including composer Paul Leonard-Morgan. Why tell the same story in two very similar formats? Did you get it wrong the first time? After seeing the film, my instinct tells me this cannot be an improvement over the first iteration, though I have not seen the documentary.
A routine sailing into the North sea for gas pipeline maintenance is already a dangerous job without any complications. Divers Dave-not-David Yuasa (Simu Liu) and loving fiancé Chris Lemmons (Finn Cole) descend to replace pipeline on the sea floor when the ship loses control of its rutters, sending it drifting on the turbulent swells. The captain of the ship (Cliff Curtis) prioritizes finding Chris while avoiding an environmental disaster of pipeline rupture. Tethered to a smaller, attached vessel, Chris and Dave are tugged along the sea floor until Chris’s tether (umbilical cord) snags on equipment at their job site and snaps off, depriving him of ship-supplied oxygen and communication. Duncan (Woody Harrelson) can only watch and try whatever he can to save their stranded coworker. With limited oxygen and freezing temperatures, the ship must find a way to get back to Chris before his time is up.
Oh, where to start… After watching this film, it feels as though Parkinson started with clichés, stuffed them into templates, and wrapped them all up into runtime padding. The film is somewhat competently made on the technical side, aside from wobbly drone footage. On the side of writing, acting, directing, cinematography, and music, the film is just poorly done. I never fault actors for bad writing, but I just felt that nobody really cared about the film they were making. There’s really not much for the actors to go on other than to put on a mask of concern, some wet eyeballs, and say “no he’s not” for ninety minutes. This is not a film where you really get to know the characters, just the major event that defines their lifetimes. This is a very sterile film.
Leonard-Morgan’s music started the film with very uninspired tunes. I was in shock, hearing what I thought was royalty-free stock music with some sonar pings slapped in. These tracks serenaded the opening credits for a boring amount of time where we got to see so much of nothing going on. Yes, I’m sure it was very important that we saw Chris get two bottles of hot sauce and have awkward first-take material hallway banter about a pink room.
You can tell everything was filmed in a studio with green screen and which exteriors were CGI and which were drone shots. From the moment we meet Chris and his fiancé, we know he will be the one to face danger by the laziest “he’s gonna die, isn’t he?” shot that I have seen in recent memory. I can’t say I was ever caught up in the moment.
Part of this is because there is an overall lack of tension. Nobody on board the ship or in the smaller vessel is fighting amongst themselves. There’s no shady corporation that could have at least added some pressure. Everyone is friends and everyone collaborates with the same moral compass. The only moments of tension come from pure action sequences where the stakes are primally of life and death.
In a mostly good scene, Dave climbs the umbilical cord back to the smaller vessel with Chris, whose vitals are uncertain, but urgency dominates the scene. All the while, the violent swells of the stormy North sea cause problems with climbing. The film’s language isn’t built to induce tension or have you guessing. I think this is a symptom of the sickness of overfamiliarity with the material. It really feels as if the filmmakers have gotten sick of the material and are now conveying what they think is necessary for the audience to understand what’s going on, but they skip through all the good stuff and linger on the already stagnant stuff. The story could have been good, but the filmmakers didn’t seem to know what the story was or even how to find it in the edit.
I’m left with my impression of an amateur production that feels very cheesy, bland, and rote. It feels like a lazy cash-grab capitalizing on other peoples’ struggles that only seems to prioritize its runtime and getting released in theaters. In the hands of a more capable filmmaker, this easily could’ve been a two-hour nail-biter. I’m just wondering what I’m doing watching this movie instead of watching the documentary.
_______________________________________________________________
Review by Colton Gomez
Colton Gomez earned his BA in Film Studies from Weber State University. He owns and operates ColtonGomez.com. Here, he covers new releases in theaters and on streaming. For short versions of his reviews, check out his LetterBoxd
_______________________________________________________________
Summary
Comentarii