Here’s a shark related fact that feels nicely apt: sharks are constantly losing teeth on the fly, so they are constantly regrowing an endless supply of new teeth that slowly rotate round creating a set of choppers that never run out. Swap out the word teeth for killer shark movies and you have something of a fitting metaphor for the never-ending feeding frenzy of finned flicks that’s been leaking into the cinematic ocean like a tell tale stream of arterial blood.
The latest shark movie to drift in on the tide is The Last Breath, yet another example of idiotic white kids getting themselves in deep shit when cooking up the idea of diving into an unchecked area for giggles – but while it honest doesn’t offer up anything we haven’t seen before, we do get a suprisingly tight premise and we get one of the last roles of the late, great Julian Sands.
As the film starts, we find ourselves privy to the last moments of the World War II battleship, The Charlotte, before a well-placed German torpedo sends it on a new, unplanned mission to chill out on the ocean floor – however, when we fast forward to the present, the ship remains as one of the last, undiscovered wrecks of the war.
It’s here that me meet Levi and Noah, a mismatched duo who scrape a living taking tourists out on diving trips in the British Virgin Islands, but while their business founders, what the old salty sea dog and his younger, Anerican protege really want to do is locate the wreck of the Charlotte and make their fortune.
Seeing as this movie only has 95 minutes to play with (with 6 of those being end credits) the film wastes no time in having Noah stumble across the partially buried wreck of the warship almost immediately but any hope of scoring the cash they need to salvage their failing business is soon dashed by politics. However, Noah is currently being visited by his old college gang in the shape of rich jerk, Brett; immature Logan; random Riley and Samantha, who has a crush on Noah that’s far easier to spot than a submerged hulk from the war and after letting slip of his discovery, the headstrong Brett insists that they take this opportunity to explore the warship before it’s reported the next day.
Presumably because he’s watched at least a couple of tourists-in-danger movies that’s been realised in the past forty years, Noah is resistant to this foolhardy plan, but when he realises he can get his loaded buddy to essentially pay off Levi’s debts, he relents and soon finds himself leading his four friends through the rusting corridors of a submerged, metal tomb. Of course, no greedy deed goes unpunished in a story like this and not long after swimming through the claustrophobic corridors, they find that they’re sharing the warship with a hungry shark who wastes no time sinking its teeth into this trapped gang of idiots.
Before we dive fully into the watery minutiae of Joachim Hedén’s toothy epic, I have a couple of things to get of my chest about the recent spate of shark movies. While they are far and away a huge step up from the no-budget trash that turned the genre into a churning mass of cartoonish shite, I can’t help but noticing that a lot of them are starting to all look the same. In the last few years alone, there’s been countless entries that sees a group of divers visiting some closed off, underwater venue only to be trapped by an opportunistic shark who starts chomping down on their number line it’s filling up on bread at Olive Garden. Obviously there’s 47 Meters Down and its sequel, but even over the last couple of years, movies like Mako and Meg 2 have seen the bulk of their stories set entirely underwater that sees their cast encased in diving gear as the attempt to act while utter submerged. When this trope first surfaced, it was undoubtedly a gimmick, but it added an extra sense of claustrophobia that put the fleshy humans fully into the danger zone which negated the sharks having to wait patiently until people fancied taking a swim.
While it’s still something of a technical achievement to be lauded, the current batch of underwater shark films (The Last Breath included) all suffer from the same issue and that’s at a certain point, it’s virtually impossible to tell anyone apart when they’re all wearing the exact same diving gear and just reduced to a pair of wildly staring eyes peering put from behind their visor. While this is something that The Last Breath is certainly guilty of, it doesn’t help that whenever the cast is out of their face covering suits, their personalities are hardly enough to make you invest in their attempted survival.
Simply put, the entirety of the films younger cast are yet another grab-bag of whiners and dick heads who’s survival instinct shuts on and off at regular intervals in order to fast track them into their disastrous predicament. All of the group are apparently highly competent drivers – except when they’re not; forgetting vital components, necking rum in air pockets and panicking instantly to such an extent, even the guy who isn’t acting the prick becomes unbearable thanks to his endless nagging.
However, despite more than its fair share of negatives, The Last Breath manages to be a damn sight better than it has any right to be thanks to a couple of stand out plus points. The first is the final film appearance of Julian Sands who plays the role of the impossibly grizzled Levi with a northern accent so broad, I was constantly expecting him to scream “ee bah gum” directly into the lens at every given opportunity and while it’s hardly the send off he deserved, watching him slam down a some whool and a pair of needles and announcing “enough knitting” with the intensity of a “smile you son of a bitch” is bizarrely touching. Elsewhere, after scripting The Dive and helming Breaking Surface, director Hedén continues his rather unsettling trend of cramming his movies full of attracting drowning people. But while the notion of people being stalked by sharks “indoors” is hardly new and he barely takes full advantage of his surroundings (what’s the point of having the characters reach the munitions room if you aren’t going to utilise some sort of shell that should have been rendered useless decades ago?), the attacks are surprisingly effective despite the blatantly CGI sharks.
So, it ain’t art (fucking hell, it isn’t even Under Paris), but The Last Breath actually holds together fairly well thanks to the gloomy claustrophobia, some decent kills and the sight of Sands soaking in some sunshine a year and a half after his tragic death. But for the most part, it’s the same old ship, different day.
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