I can’t swear to it, but I have a suspicion that Woody Harrelson signed on to star in the deep-sea adventure “Last Breath” only when assured he wouldn’t have to submerge so much as a toenail in water. As Duncan Allcock, the leader of a three-man dive team on a perilous North Sea mission, Harrelson not only remains impressively bone-dry throughout, he even manages to spend most of the movie seated.
Allcock’s dive buddies are not so lucky, and we soon learn why one of them, Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu) — unforthcoming to a fault — is filmed early on pumping even more volume into his already generously sculpted upper body. This visual shorthand is one of the movie’s most common tics, both forewarning and a lazy substitute for fully realized characters and revealing dialogue. In Harrelson’s case, this takes the form of an entrance that screams “mildly eccentric, extremely chill old-timer” as Allcock shows up for duty in a Hawaiian shirt and ill-fitting khakis, a queen-size floral pillow under one arm and a bag of chocolate treats in the other. The character is so clearly suggestive of the man who plays him, I fully expected him to pull out a bong.
Cinematic comfort food disguised as a disaster movie, “Last Breath,” blandly directed by Alex Parkinson, is based on the 2019 documentary of the same name, which Parkinson directed with Richard da Costa. The actual events must have been nail-biting: In 2012, during a routine repair of an oil pipe, the young diver Chris Lemons (here played by Finn Cole in a role that requires little beyond looking meltingly cute and credibly unconscious) was cast adrift in deep water without access to oxygen or communications. Yet Parkinson and his fellow writers (Mitchell LaFortune and David Brooks) seem unable to shape a gripping narrative, and we’re given no real sense of who these people are outside their dive suits.
Unspooling in large part in near-pitch blackness, “Last Breath” struggles to convey urgency. Far above Lemons, in the safety of a diving bell, Allcock — a veteran diver on what he believes is his final mission — and Yuasa wait impatiently for an opportunity to rescue their teammate. From time to time, the camera peeks above the ocean surface to watch the crew of their dive ship (including the always-enjoyable Mark Bonnar as the dive supervisor) scramble to overcome an electrical failure. Underwater, however, everything moves with a dreamy sluggishness that the time clock onscreen, counting down Lemons’s remaining minutes of reserve oxygen, does little to dispel.
A movie of barely sketched personalities and trite emotional stakes (the lovely Bobby Rainsbury, as Lemons’s anxious fiancée, is especially underserved), “Last Breath” is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic. Harrelson, though, seems delighted: Perhaps only Woody could headline an action movie and be virtually stationary for the duration.
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