Last Breath opens in theaters Friday, February 28.
I love watching movies about terrible jobs. Anything that involves watching people do impossible, dangerous, potentially deadly tasks to earn their living is good entertainment in my book, especially when I get to watch the proceedings while nestled inside a movie theater recliner or under a blanket on my couch, peeping through my fingers. Amazing news for anyone who shares the same sentiment: Last Breath, the thriller where Woody Harrelson tries to save a guy who is freezing and suffocating to death at the bottom of the ocean, is about what I would consider the worst job in the whole world.
Part of the fun of watching a movie like Last Breath (and, despite its subject matter, it’s still pretty fun) is in seeing how a filmmaker depicts everything that goes into preparing for an extremely complex and perhaps even dangerous job. In this case, it’s deep-sea saturation diving, which, going into Last Breath, I knew very little about – and, now that I’ve seen it, I feel like I’m an expert. The actors bandy about sci-fi-esque terminology like “heliox” and “umbilical tether” while sealing each other inside metal tubes where their insides will be pressurized according to the atmospheres they’ll be working under at depth. It’s an utterly fascinating process, and a relatively easy way to make sure your audience is locked in for whatever happens next.
It also has the added benefit of being about something that actually happened not that long ago: a real-life accident in which diver Chris Lemons’ connections to air, heat, and communications systems onboard his support vessel were severed, marooning him at the bottom of the North Sea with only a small backup supply of oxygen. His fellow divers Duncan Allcock and David Yuasa embarked on a daring mission to get Lemons back to the surface, not knowing if it would be a rescue or a body recovery.
Last Breath plays things by the book, a typically tense survival drama with all the terrifying missteps and inspiring moments of human endurance that go with it. The trio of leads is a study in stock character types: Lemons (Finn Cole) is the youthful newbie determined to prove himself to the pros. Allcock (Harrelson) is the paternal veteran trying to get the most out of his last assignment before retirement. Yuasa (Simu Liu) carries himself with the zen-like intensity one could expect from someone whose day job is trying not to die at the bottom of the ocean. It’s savvy to keep things feeling this familiar, given the wild reality Last Breath dramatizes.
And, boy, is it wild. We get a front-row seat to the inner workings of saturation diving: Actors are constantly yanking heavy diving suits on and off, and a large portion of the action was filmed underwater. Scenes aboard the support vessel’s bridge (captained by Cliff Curtis – I always love seeing him) are bookended by vertigo-inducing shots of the prow plunging into troughs between 50-foot swells. Director Alex Parkinson reuses some of the real footage he gathered for the 2019 documentary he made about the accident (also called Last Breath, and co-directed by Richard da Costa), including one truly awful shot of an unconscious Lemons going into oxygen deprivation shock. There are times when what’s onscreen feels overwhelming, and then you remember that all of this genuinely happened. That knowledge adds a real sense of awe that a completely made-up story just wouldn’t be able to conjure.
Last Breath mainly succeeds because of what it’s about. The actors are capable, the script keeps things simple, and the direction from Parkinson is very good (props to the underwater filming crew). That’s really all it takes for a movie like this – my only real gripe is that the archetypal anxious girlfriend character (Bobby Rainsbury) is little more than that, a character type that’s more frustrating for how ubiquitous it is in this sort of movie. I was just happy to be watching a bunch of people running around on the ocean floor trying not to freeze to death And I was even happier not to be down there with them.
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