Woody Harrelson in Last Breath
LAST BREATH
By nature, every survival thriller based on a true story is also, at heart, a procedural. Even if we don't know the specifics behind the real-life stories told in Apollo 13 and Thirteen Lives, or an even-more-harrowing saga such as the one presented in 2023's Society of the Snow, we enter these films knowing that at least a significant number of the traumatized will wind up okay. (There are occasional outliers – Wolfgang Petersen's 2000 downer A Perfect Storm is a Hollywood blockbuster that would never be green-lit these days.) And because we know that a largely happy ending is in store, we're free to relax, at least a bit, and enjoy the sight of professionals doing their damnedest to make seemingly unworkable situations miraculously work.
As director/co-writer Alex Parkinson's Last Breath was adapted from a 2019 documentary of the same title (which he co-directed with Richard de Costa), there isn't much suspense regarding its trapped deep-sea diver Chris Lemons, who went nearly a half-hour without oxygen while workmates attempted to save the seemingly lost man during an oil-pipeline mission gone wrong. You'd have to be a psychopath, or a psychopathic studio, to agree to re-stage a fatal tragedy as a moderately fictionalized cineplex crowd-pleaser. There's also the matter of it being really dark 330 feet below the North Sea surface, meaning that despite Lemons' terror after his breathing tether snapped and he was submerged without light, we audiences wouldn't be able to see much of it. Yet given the movie's obviously manufactured clichés, lack of narrative surprise, and literally unclear view of the goings-on, Parkinson's admirably taut 90 minutes do their job. I may not have understood all the machinations involved in bringing Lemons back safely, but I believed that Last Breath's helmer and cast knew what they were doing, and in the end, that was far more important.
If you've seen even two or three of these impossible-rescue entertainments, you'll potentially roll your eyes as Parkinson puts all his ducks in a row. Here's Chris (Finn Cole), a Scottish sweetie with a mile-wide grin who tries to convince his fiancée (Bobby Rainsbury) that deep-sea expedition is no more dangerous than traveling in space! (!!!) Here's teammate David (Simu Liu), a buff, mythically gifted loner too jaded to let emotions get in the way of his duties … for now! Here, with his Hawaiian-print shirt and security pillow, is team leader Duncan, a middle-aged charmer whom we know is chill because he's played by Woody Harrelson! Everyone in sight – the list includes characters played by Cliff Curtis, MyAnna Buring, and the terrific Mark Bonnar – is the exact stereotype you expect, and their dialogue is similarly on-the-nose. If you anticipated getting through Parkinson's feature without hearing, under a swelling score, “Let's go get Chris” and “Let's go home,” you haven't seen enough of these things.
That said, there's a fair amount of legitimate tension once Lemons' situation goes haywire, especially during the rather heart-stopping few seconds after the diver's “umbilical cord” breaks and, like Chris, we're left in the dark with no visibility and, worse, no sound. Plus, despite most of the scientific and aquatic info soaring straight over my head, it was a treat to view this decidedly old-school spectacle solely for the pleasure of watching smart professionals doing their jobs, united in the singleminded pursuit of reclaiming one of their own, whether alive or dead. It's no more than a solid, corny, meat-and-potatoes adventure. But every so often, the confidently assembled Last Breath might inspire you to hold yours.
RIFF RAFF
Bill Murray has been sleepwalking through so many recent screen appearances – I hesitate to call them “roles” – that it's a genuine thrill to see him wide awake in Riff Raff … or, at least, as wide aware as Bill Murray has appeared this millennium. Part of his comparative enthusiasm must lie with the fact that we haven't, to my recollection, seen him do a lot of this stuff before. In any previous movie, for instance, has he ever spoken with an identifiable Boston dialect? Or fired a gun? Or been as deeply unsettling? Watching Murray in director Dito Montiel's weirdly yet not debilitatingly shapeless throwaway, I was reminded of the jolt Albert Brooks gave to his scenes in 2011's Drive. Brooks' quiet volatility, though, was scary. Murray's is more accurately ticklish, as well as the best reason to see this watchable yet undeniably unsatisfying crime-thriller-comedy-slash-family-melodrama that keeps threatening to be more interesting than it ever is.
John Pollono's script is essentially another of those “sins of the father” deals, where grown (or nearly grown) sons have to choose between following in their dads' violent footsteps or forging their own, less brutal paths. One of the fathers is Ed Harris' Vincent, a formerly murderous enforcer attempting a life of quiet bliss with his inhumanly patient wife of nearly 20 years (Gabrielle Union's Sandy) and her heading-to-Dartmouth son (Miles J. Harvey's DJ). Another father is Murray's Leftie, a decades-long killer whose own son (Michael Angelo Covino's Jonathan) is offed, for perfectly understandable reason, by Vincent's son Rocco (Lewis Pullman). And Rocco is the third father – or, rather, father-to-be, as his Italian girlfriend (Emanuela Postacchini's Marina) is eight-months pregnant with a son of their own. Throw Jennifer Coolidge, as Vincent's acerbic ex-wife Ruth, and Pete Davidson, as Leftie's shifty partner Lonnie, into the mix, and we should have all the makings for a high-lar-ious unwanted-family-reunion slapstick, right? Er … right?
Well, yes. In theory. But if that were actually the case, why is Riff Raff so routinely dour? It's not that Pollono's jokes don't play. In the rare instances that he provides some, I chuckled at several of Murray's and Davidson's bits, and enjoyed the comedic cluelessness of P.J. Byrne and Brooke Dillman as chatty, overly helpful neighbors whose fates are sealed the moment they meet the deadpan hoodlums. But Coolidge's drunken lasciviousness is pretty grating, Harvey's energetic nerdspeak rarely makes sense under the circumstances, and there's all this inherent, Sundance-adjacent seriousness in Montiel's presentation. It's as if no one told him that this collision of gangster-comedy archetypes could only be played for big, easy laughs if it was gonna play at all.
Still, with Riff Raff likely to be forgotten by the time this article is published, the assembled company is agreeable enough (though I could've done without the marital canoodling between the eternally gorgeous Union and the more-skeletal-by-the-day Harris), the woodland-Maine setting is lovely, and huzzah! – Bill Murray is momentarily allowed to be an actor again. Montiel's and Pollono's film is rife with flashbacks, few of them necessary. But one revisited heart-to-heart between Leftie and Jonathan was truly painful in the best way, and suggested an intriguing cinematic path forward for 74-year-old Murray: Don't let him make any jokes whatsoever. I'd love to see where that constraint might lead him.
