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.

Producers: Simon West, Jib Polhemus, Martin Brennan, Norman Golightly, Hal Sadoff and Petr Jákl   Director: Simon West   Screenplay: Greg Johnson   Cast: Christoph Waltz, Lucy Liu, Cooper Hoffman, Ryan McParland, Ann Akinjirin, Jason Done, Tony Hirst, Kate Katzman, Helen Ryan, Conor Mullen, Rory Mullen, Karishma Navekar, Charlie Hamblett, Maisy Crowley and Desmond Eastwood   Distributor: The Avenue

Grade: C

Another week, another hit man movie—one that turns out to be a thoroughly mediocre entry in the groaningly overstuffed genre, offering little that’s new and not doing enough to invigorate the familiar stuff. 

The sole distinction of “Old Guy” is that it stars Christoph Waltz, who brings his customary flair (as well as a prodigious moustache) to the role of Danny Dolinski, a veteran killer-for-hire who’s being sidelined by his longtime controller Opal (Ann Akinjirin) against whom, if he were in a different profession, he might bring a discrimination action on grounds of ageism.

But Opal has some justification for forcing Danny into semi-retirement: his shooting hand was seriously injured, how we don’t know, and though a surgeon has done his best to fuse the joints, Dolinski’s fingers can still seize up at any moment.  Anyway, she still intends to use him to dispose of employees who have proven unreliable (like the thug played by Ryan McParland in an early sequence) and to serve as a mentor of sorts to promising Wihlborg (Cooper Hoffman), an adept young killer who has the unfortunate habit of leaving too many innocent bystanders behind as collateral damage. 

The fact that the abstemious, New Agey Wihlborg is the diametrical opposite of hard-living, hedonistic Danny is supposed to add humorous contrast to the forced partnership, but the jokes that scripter Greg Johnson invents for them—like Wihlborg sarcastically calling Danny Obi-wan, or Dolinski dismissing Wihlborg as Nancy Reagan when the younger guy criticizes his drug use (a reference Wihlborg, of course, doesn’t get)—land with a thud.

In any event, the duo are sent to Belfast to terminate some of the major players in the Northern Irish mob, apparently so that Opal and her cohorts can take over.  Danny impulsively invites Anata (Lucy Liu) along—she’s the manager of a swanky London club that serves as a bordello, and claims that she’s always wanted to visit there. So as Danny gets to work, he’ll have somebody to spend the nights with.

The first kill, on a golf course, goes badly when Danny’s hand acts up and Wihlborg has to save the day.  The second is meant to demonstrate another difference between the unwilling partners—Danny has old-school principles, while Wihlborg is ethics-free.  That’s made clear when Danny not only refuses to be bribed by their target (Conor Mullen) into sparing him and instead killing their employer, but makes sure that the guy’s sweet little granddaughter (Maisy Crowley) is tucked safely in  bed before blasting her granddad.

His adherence to a code is even more emphatically proven when, in the final act, he insists on rescuing Wihlborg, who’s captured when they’re betrayed by one of their own.  Miraculously, Danny’s hand shows no signs of impairment as he effortlessly disposes of a small army of well-armed thugs and takes out their leader.  Nonetheless the business puts them all at risk, and they must flee to safer climes, stopping only to pick up Danny’s aged mother (Helen Ryan).  We’ve been told early on that he’d extricated her from Poland, but the old girl appears to have been in Ireland long enough to have picked up a thick brogue even though her son retains his accent.

“Old Guy” offers some nice shots of the Irish countryside, courtesy of cinematographer Martin Ahlgren, but despite Waltz’s energy and the efforts of director Simon West, an action-movie veteran, and no fewer than four editors (Andrew MacRitchie, Todd E. Miller, Chris Gill, John Walters), it manages to stir up very little suspense or excitement. 

Nor does the cast apart from Waltz add much to the mix.  Hoffman may have inherited some of his father’s talent, but he simply seems miscast here, though the script gives him no help.  Liu fares even worse: a scene with a doctor she’s been romancing in hopes of something permanent, clumsily inserted to give the character a smidgen some depth, is an embarrassment.  Oh, well, anyone who’s ever seen a movie before knows full well from their first moment onscreen that Anata and Danny are fated to be together in the end (Mother Dolinski obviously can tell that as soon as she meets her).  The supporting cast is purely functional, though Ryan and Crowley each connect; so is Heather Greenlees’ production design (only Opal’s mansion impresses), along with the drab score by Andrew Simon McAllister and Zero Vu.

It’s nice to see Waltz in a lead role.  Now would somebody write one worthy of him?  The best you can say about “Old Guy” is that it’s not as bad as “Love Hurts,” and doesn’t treat him as poorly as that mess did Ke Huy Quan.