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LAST BREATH

Producers: David Brooks Paul Brooks, Hal Sadoff, Norman Golightly, Jeremy Plager, Stewart le Marechal, Al Morrow, Anna Mohr-Pietsch and Paul Parker  Director: Alex Parkinson   Screenplay: Mitchell LaFortune, Alex Parkinson and David Brooks   Cast: Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole, Cliff Curtis, Mark Bonner, Myanna Buring, Bobby Rainsbury, Josef Altin and Connor Reed   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C

Alex Parkinson’s docudrama about an ill-fated saturation diving accident that occurred off the Scottish coast in 2012 follows on a 2019 documentary about the incident that he wrote and co-directed under the same title with Richard da Costa.  Some have compared “Last Breath” to Ron Howard’s 1995 “Apollo 13,” but it can also be set beside a more recent Howard effort, “Thirteen Lives” (2022), which recreated the 2018 rescue of a boys’ soccer team from a flooding cave in Thailand.  Unhappily it’s inferior to both.

What the film has going for it is Parkinson’s obvious desire for authenticity.  Grant Montgomery’s production design reproduces the settings with great care, and though the exterior shots of the “mother ship” from which the diving apparatus is launched have the look and feel of VFX creations, the interior is convincing, as is that of the small bell in which the three major characters descend to repair a pipeline on the seabed.  And Nick Remy Matthews’ cinematography is far from—if you’ll excuse the word—splashy, especially in terms of the murkiness of the barely-lit diving scenes.

The film’s flaws, on the other hand, are considerable.  It fails to fashion fully rounded characters, so that viewers are less invested in them than they should be—while making the mistake of casting in a major role a star whose shtick is so familiar his very presence undermines the credibility of the recreation.  And while it needs to be a nerve-wracking nail-biter, Parkinson’s sense of pace and Tania Goding’s editing often come across as dilatory, even torpid; the relentlessness the story demands seeps away, and the big moments fail to register as they should. 

Despite the presence of Woody Harrelson as Duncan Allcock, the veteran who leads the three-man crew that becomes the focus of the narrative (there are other contingents of three, but they’re little more than window dressing), the main character is actually Finn Cole (Chris Lemons), the young first-timer trained by Allcock whose fate becomes central when he’s separated from the “umbilical cord”—his oxygen source—during the dive and must rely on a backup system of very limited duration in his helmet.

But although the film begins with a prologue showing Cole and his fiancée Hanna (Bobby Rainsbury) saying their farewells before he leaves for the mission, he never emerges as a compelling figure, being more the stock newbie just as Allcock is the old guy who’s being reluctantly put out to pasture.  It doesn’t help that on the one hand Lemons, while pleasant enough, proves a pretty colorless actor, and Harrelson is just too much himself to disappear into his character.  Simu Liu is David Yuasa, the third member of the crew, presented initially as a man who submerges his emotions to concentrate single-mindedly on the job at hand but becomes more involved as his comrade’s life hangs in the balance.  Yuasa is physically convincing, and does a reasonably good job of delineating the character’s arc.  But he’s playing third fiddle here.

While the crisis of Cole, Allcock and Yuasa is playing out near the ocean floor, the one above it on the ship is given almost equal attention.  There Craig (Mark Bonnar), the mission supervisor, along with Captain Jenson (Cliff Curtis) and his first officer Hanna (Myanna Buring), struggle to restore power to the vessel’s malfunctioning DPS, an effort that requires desperate emergency intervention from the DPO (Josef Altin). 

Meanwhile Jenson and Hanna assume manual control over navigation to ensure that the ship is not buffeted away from the diving location, while Craig takes over from the nervous ROV operator (Connor Reed) to use the ship’s underwater robot to retrieve Lemons’ body.  Since he’d gone without oxygen for nearly half an hour, most assume that he couldn’t have survived. Of course, stories of this sort are unlikely to be turned into dramas if the ending is bleak, so you won’t be disappointed if you expect a miracle.  Paul Leonard-Morgan’s score, which has worked hard throughout, swells as powerfully as the storm-tossed waves to rouse our spirits accordingly.

Like the three actors playing the divers, those on the ship are entirely adequate—some, like Bonnar and Curtis more than that—but their characters aren’t much more than sketches, and the performers simply draw within the lines.

“Last Breath” ought to be riveting but instead is merely workmanlike, efficient rather than viscerally exciting.  And though he gives it his all, Harrelson’s presence seems to scream out that it’s just a movie. It might have been wiser for  Parkinson to have been content with his documentary.

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MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE

Producers: Paul Scanlan, Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, Terri Lubaroff, Ray Maiello, Mike Field, Richard Silverman and Robert Paschall Jr.   Director: Kyle Hausmann-Stokes   Screenplay: Kyle Hausmann-Stokes and AJ Bermudez   Cast: Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Utkarsh Ambudkar and Gloria Reuben   Distributor: Briarcliff Entertainment

Grade: B-

Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ debut feature is a fairly pedestrian message movie, but the workmanlike, often bumpy approach–resembling that of a solid telefilm–doesn’t seriously dilute the power of the message, which centers on the psychological damage suffered by soldiers who’ve served in combat.

The protagonist is Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), a veteran of the war in Afghanistan; periodic flashbacks show her with her comrade-in-arms and best friend Zoe (Natalie Morales) while they navigate the barbs of their male colleagues and the dangers posed by enemy snipers as they patrol the camp.  Zoe is the caustically energetic counterpart to the more subdued, recessive Merit.  She’s particularly cutting when she discusses her friend’s plans to go to college back home; she’s considering re-enlisting, though Merit insists that their closeness will survive the return to civilian life.

Now Merit is back stateside, accompanied by the loquacious, sardonic ghost of Zoe, who, we are given to assume as those flashbacks progress, was too ready to put herself in harm’s way in Afghanistan.  She even goes with Merit to group therapy sessions ordered by the court as an alternative to possible jail time for an accident she’d caused.  They’re conducted by Dr. Cole (Morgan Freeman), who repeatedly warns that he won’t be able to sign off on Merit’s participation unless she attends regularly and talks about what’s troubling her.

But Merit has another issue to deal with.  She’s informed by her mother Kris (Gloria Reuben) that her granddad Dale (Ed Harris), a widower and army vet living alone at a remote lakeside house, has begun to suffer from serious mental lapses, the result of early Alzheimer’s.  Kris insists that her daughter check on him, and naturally Zoe tags along.  The story thus becomes a binary one, juggling Merit’s struggle with Dale’s and bringing both to resolutions that emphasize patriotism along with personal flaws.

But that’s not all.  Hausmann-Stokes and co-writer AJ Bermudez also shoehorn into the plot a romance between Merit and Alex (Utkarsh Ambudkar), a genial fellow she meets—cute, of course—while out on a run as he’s cutting grass as the cemetery.  Coincidentally he turns out to be the manager of the senior living center where Kris ad Merit are angling to move Dale.  Naturally there’s a scene, set at a local July Fourth celebration, where Dale learns accidentally how Merit and Alex know each other. 

That gives Harris the opportunity to take the gruffness he brings to Dale to the highest level, cementing another of his predictably believable turns, and Freeman is equally convincing in exuding stern but patient concern.  On the other side of the age spectrum, Martin-Green balances toughness and vulnerability well as Merit, while Morales brings Zoe’s sometimes irritating intensity vibrantly to life even in spectral form.  Together they pull off a last-act flashback that’s likely to startle most viewers   Ambudkar makes Alex, a guy who might have been grating, instead ingratiating.

Technically this is a modest film, but Whit Vogel’s production design and Dionne Barens’ costumes capture the changing timeframes skillfully enough, while Ali Greer’s editing makes those transitions, if not seamless, coherent—using the abruptness of the flashbacks to suggest the discomfort of Merit’s PTSD-driven recollections.  Dan Romer’s score is unobtrusive, which is not an adjective one could apply to the pop songs Merit and Zoe are accustomed to sing along with.

“My Dead Friend Zoe” is at times dramatically clumsy, but its sincerity in dealing with the emotional toll combat takes, along with some fine performances, largely compensates for the deficiencies.