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‘Last Breath’ Review: Real-Life Deep Sea Survival Tale’s Devotion To Facts Waters Down The Drama
Last Breath is based on the real-life story of Chris Lemons, a deep sea diver who somehow lived through nearly 40 minutes of oxygen deprivation.
In 2012, Lemons (played in the narrative film by Finn Cole) was caught in the deep sea without oxygen flow after a computer error set off a domino chain of bad luck, leaving his umbilical cord literally severed as he desperately tried to swim back to safety. After an especially trite opening act chock-full of overtly foreshadowed, cliched and chummy dialogue — including an odd streak of requisite homoerotic, homophobic banter out of Duncan Allcock ( Woody Harrelson) — the film does settle briefly into a flow of honorable, quotidian heroism. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is rote and persistently worthy of an eye-roll, replete as it is with devotion to teammates and camaraderie in the face of unprecedented adversity, or that nearly every second of the film’s runtime is leaden with saccharine scoring — an exhausting swell of orchestral music that never lets us forget for even a second just how majestic this moment is supposed to feel.
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