Last Breath Parent Guide

Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) thinks he has the coolest job in the world – although his concerned fiancée, Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) would disagree. Chris is a saturation diver, a skilled technician who undergoes multi-day decompression to spend long periods making repairs to undersea infrastructure. When he’s down deep, Chris is effectively an astronaut, entirely dependent on a pressurized suit attached to a long umbilical cable which feeds him oxygen, power, and heated water, all of which he needs to survive for any amount of time in the freezing depths of the North Sea. So when Chris’s cord gets snagged and torn off during a surprise storm, his fellow divers David (Simu Liu) and Duncan (Woody Harrelson), have their work cut out for them: Find and rescue Chris before his ten minutes of emergency air run out. Or, failing that, recover his body. Time is of the essence.

I’ve never run into a feature film adaptation of a documentary before, and that provenance makes Last Breath a strange beast. As you might expect in a film based on a documentary, there’s a lot of B-roll – vague establishing shots, close ups of mechanical details, slow pans – and it feels like someone shot most of a documentary and forgot to add any of the voice over. The film does pick up into the second half, but it’s got a rough start.

The movie somewhat overcompensates with a double-barreled casting sheet, and the performances are good across the board – can you feel the “but” coming? – but they just don’t have all that much to do. Most of this rescue involves making important decisions while sitting in either a large ship or a small diving bell, and it does somewhat drag down the intensity. There should be intensity to spare, this being a very dicey, very high-stakes race against the clock in awful conditions. It just isn’t always enough to keep things interesting.

On the plus side, the film is also surprisingly family-friendly although there’s constant peril and a fair amount of techno-babble, which might dissuade younger teen viewers. Violence is limited to people being thrown around underwater in accidents (floating gloomily about) and a brief shot of a dead body on a shipwreck. The biggest issue is a sprinkling of scatological profanity atop all this, but only a light sprinkling, and given the circumstances I’m inclined to respect their restraint. No sex, no drinking, no smoking – just one guy three hundred feet below the North Sea with ten minutes worth of air. Hard to get in too much trouble down their on your lonesome.