Review: Last Breath

Image courtesy of MetFilm Production.

I wanted to like director Alex Parkinson's "Last Breath," a true story disaster film, a little more than I did, considering some extraordinary elements of the events that took place. The film tells the story of a diving team that is sent to the ocean's floor to work on some pipes, but one of them is left stranded after his umbilical tether gets snagged, leaving him with only several minutes of oxygen left in his tank.

The film takes the somewhat formulaic approach of men who have a tough job going through the routines of their work. There's not a whole lot in the way of character formation - Woody Harrelson is the jovial diver Duncan who is nearing retirement age but not ready to call it quits, Simu Liu is the gruff and all-business-all-the-time diver Dave, and Finn Cole is Chris, the diver who gets stuck below and has a girlfriend to whom he promises he will return safely.

Above the water is the team of technicians who work frantically to correct the desperate situation below. The team includes Cliff Curtis as the captain and MyAnna Buring as one of the technicians. Most of the scenes involving these characters finds them furrowing brows while things go south at the ocean's bottom.

The main problem with "Last Breath" is that it takes an incident - albeit a harrowing one that is good for creating drama - that could have made for a compelling 30-minute TV episode and stretched it out to the length of a feature. Much of the dialogue involves people shouting out commands or expressing concerns.

Some of the underwater photography is engaging from a visual standpoint, but there are also times when the murkiness of the ocean's depths makes it a bit difficult for viewers to see exactly what's going on. The script's dialogue is primarily expository dialogue when its characters aren't spouting platitudes.

I've probably made the film sound worse than it actually is. At its core, "Last Breath" is a movie about men working perilous jobs and finding themselves in a terrifying situation that has a resolution that somewhat defies the odds. As such, it's engrossing enough and some obvious tension helps move along the proceedings. 

But at the risk of repeating myself: What could have made for a gripping half-hour of TV feels like an overly long telling of a story that probably took a total of about 30 minutes in real life, but has somehow turned into a 90-minute movie.