Producers: Andrew Prendergast and Chris Reed Director: Joachim Hedén Screenplay: Nick Saltrese Cast: Kim Spearman, Jack Parr, Alexander Arnold, Erin Mullen, Arlo Carter, Maxime Durand and Julian Sands Distributor: RLJE Films
Grade: D
Ever since “Jaws” sharks have played a major role in horror movies, and here’s another example. Shot by Eric Börjeson in attractive locations around Malta, Joachim Hedén’s “The Last Breath” is otherwise a sadly feeble addition to sharkmania.
There’s one other element that sets it apart, though: it includes one of the last performances by veteran Julian Sands, who died in a hiking accident in early 2023. He’s practically unrecognizable as Levi, a bearded old fellow who owns a boat that takes tourists out diving in the waters around the Virgin Islands. He and his young partner Noah (Jack Parr) have been searching for the wreck of the USS Charlotte, a warship sunk by a German torpedo back in 1944
A brief prologue recreates that wartime disaster on a very modest scale but gives the audience just a glimpse of what they’ve signed up for when a couple of survivors splashing in the water are attacked by a large shark. One won’t appear again for nearly fifty minutes.
Instead, we shift to the present, when Noah finds the remains of the Charlotte, in pursuit of which Levi’s been scouring the bottom for forty years, after a storm: Noah opines that recent bad weather had swept aside the sand that had covered the hulk and protected it from deterioration.
The discovery coincides with the arrival of some of Noah’s old friends for a visit. There’s Sam (Kim Spearman), a New York doctor who’d been his girlfriend. The others are rich, arrogant Brett (Alexander Arnold), likable Riley (Erin Mullen) and group nerd Logan (Arlo Carter).
When Noah lets drop the secret of the find, Brett offers a cash payment to be taken to the ship—he wants photos for his Instagram account—before it’s reported to the authorities. Levi says no, but when Noah finds that the old fellow is in debt for nearly $40,000, he agrees for a payment of $50,000, an offer Brett accepts with the condition that their other three friends tag along.
So the five descend to the wreck while Levi mans the boat above, applying himself to his habit of knitting to help dexterity in his hands. A good deal of time is devoted to the search of the vessel: the adventurers descend to the third level before noticing that they’ll have some difficulty finding their way out. Then the sharks arrive, puzzling Noah, who’d never seen any in the area before. Again, he guesses that the recent storm is to blame.
In any case the rest of he movie is devoted to the efforts of the five trapped divers to escape the sharks as their individual supplies of air fall. Writer Nick Saltrese and Hedén go to great lengths to try to inject excitement into the proceedings: Sam, for example, actually performs underwater surgery on one of the five who has been seriously injured—a scene that’s so protracted that it grows more than a little ridiculous. And they’re careful to ensure that the sole character viewers have been primed to dislike gets his just deserts, and another will be cheered for a supreme act of self-sacrifice.
The movie can’t avoid nods to “Jaws”—perhaps most notably in a scene toward the close when one character asks another if a third has survived, and the answer is a subdued negative (a shout-out to Quint). But in that case, and so many others, the comparisons are always in Spielberg’s favor. He had a bigger budget, of course: by contrast, “Breath” looks awfully threadbare, and though Börjeson, production designer Thomas Delord, effects supervisor Stuart Love and composer Patrick Kirst do their best with the meager resources at their disposal, the result is pretty shabby. Editors Fredrik Morheden and Albin Simonsson work hard as well but are hampered by the thinness of the plot and the repetitiveness of the underwater footage.
As to the actors, they try their best too, and are generally a personable bunch, with Parr and Spearman pleasant as a couple obviously meant for one another and Arnold convincingly snooty. And if Mullen is colorless and Carter overdoes the dweeb shtick, one can always wait around for Sands’s inserts. He’s one of those performers who always seems to be overplaying even when he’s trying to underplay, but it’s good to have one more chance to see him, even in an inferior piece of work like this.
“The Last Breath” won’t make you hold yours—it’s far too flat and tedious, with its murky underwater sequences and mediocre effects. But it would probably fare just fine on the SyFy Channel.