What goes into The Last Breath might not be the recipe for a great dive but it’s certainly the formula for the latest in sharxploitation movies.
Take five assorted twenty-something idiots and an old salt, a Caribbean wreck, great white sharks that can’t resist the ship’s narrow companionways, a convenient airspace for meetings and five full-face helmets providing startlingly clear comms and you have the ingredients for 93 minutes of cinematic mayhem.
That’s The Last Breath, lazily titled given that there is already an excellent 2019 underwater film called Last Breath about commercial divers in the North Sea. This new, unrelated movie is straight to digital.
It was made by Swedish director Joachim Hedén, who has underwater previous, having directed Breaking Surface in 2020, remade last year as The Dive: “A winter diving trip in Norway turns into a desperate race against time for two sisters when one of them becomes trapped at the bottom of the ocean by falling rocks.” So he hasn’t moved a million miles in terms of formula.
The Last Breath stars five young actors you might not have heard of as the sharkbait, along with well-known face Julian Sands, cast as grizzled old Yorkshire diver Levi, a skipper on his uppers operating a beaten-up dive-boat in the British Virgin Islands (yet still in a position to lay on those perfectly functioning FFMs). Sands was lost while mountain-walking shortly after The Last Breath wrapped so, sadly, this was his final film role.
His character has been obsessed for decades with finding the WW2 wreck of the USS Charlotte and, wouldn’t you know it, his youthful summer assistant Noah (Jack Parr) has just come across it at a depth of 30m, after a tropical storm shifted its covering of sand.
Coincidentally, that same day four of Noah’s old college friends turn up. The most obnoxious of them, Wall Street wally Brett (Alexander Arnold), is soon waving thousands of dollar bills at Noah and Levi to be allowed a sneak peek at the Charlotte before its position is declared to the authorities. Come on, man, what could go wrong?
All their own stunts
You can probably imagine the rest. The divers, not the sort to go in for buddy-checks and stuff like that, fool around, someone panics, air is wasted, liquor is consumed under water and then it’s really a question of how many of these forgettable characters will evade the patrolling sharks and make it back to the surface intact.
During pre-production the cast, most of whom started as novice divers, undertook extensive training in Malta. This paid off, because stunt doubles were hardly used at all during the nine-week shoot, so good for them.
The film was shot in Malta and in a studio in Antwerp, Belgium where the wreck of the Charlotte was set up. Underwater co-ordinator was Ian Creed of Oceanfilms.
By the way, if my tone seems to suggest that you should avoid watching the The Last Breath, that was not my intention. I have found over the years that I can derive considerable enjoyment from almost all underwater movies at some level, simply on the basis that they’re about divers and diving.
My enjoyment might not always be for the right reasons, but I usually find myself entertained one way or another. You can decide if you want to splash out on this one. The Last Breath is set for UK release on Blu-ray, DVD and digital on 1 July, distributed by Signature Entertainment.
Also on Divernet: 20 TITLES FOR DIVERS STREAMING ON NETFLIX, NEW ON NETFLIX: THE DEEPEST BREATH, DIVE ODYSSEY: BEHIND THE SCENES, CAGE DIVE MOVIE REVIEW, HOW WE MADE LAST BREATH
