The Big Picture

A solid “Sharksploitation” concept provides a necessary hook for audiences.
The underwater sets come with an inherent eeriness and dread.
Sadly, the characters and shark designs are as forgettable as most fin flicks of the last few years.

The “Sharksploitation” subgenre has struggled to produce dominant hits since 2016’s The Shallows. Between examples like TheBlack Demon and The Requin, fans of fin flicks have been subjected to an overflow of waterlogged atrocities. Joachim Hedén seemed destined to turn the tides with The Last Breath, coming from a filmmaker who’d already astounded us with underwater thrills in Breaking Surface (2020). Submerged cinematography is once again sharp, and the claustrophobia of being trapped inside a shipwreck while diving is real, but chalk another loss for sharky cinema. The Last Breath is competent to a point, without ever exceeding — or even achieving — baseline aquatic horror standards.

The Last Breath (2024) In The Last Breath, Levi, a British expat diver dedicates his life to finding the wreck of the WWII battleship USS Charlotte. Joined by US college graduate Noah and his friends, Levi leads a scuba diving expedition in the Caribbean. Their adventure takes a deadly turn when they become trapped inside the wreck, running out of air and facing the relentless threat of great white sharks.Release Date June 12, 2024 Director Joachim Hedén Cast Julian Sands , Alexander Arnold , Jack Parr , Kim Spearman , Erin Mullen , Arlo Carter , Maxime Durand , William Erazo Fernández Runtime 96 Minutes Writers Andrew Prendergast , Nick Saltrese Expand

What Is ‘The Last Breath’ About?

The film’s paradise of choice transports us to crystal clear British Virgin Island waters, where skipper Levi (Julian Sands) and his right-hand diver Noah (Jack Parr) have located the sunken WWII wreckage of the USS Charlotte. To follow protocol, Levi and Noah must report the vessel’s location to the proper authorities for inspection and mapping. That same day, Noah’s four best friends pay his shanty-shack island a visit for a reunion — Wall Street dickhead Brett (Alexander Arnold), tag-along Riley (Erin Mullen), stoner goofball Logan (Arlo Carter), and ex-girlfriend Sam (Kim Spearman). Noah lets slip to mega-wealthy Brett the Charlotte’s unexplored potential, and with Levi in dire financial straights, agrees to a private drive-through first thing in the morning for a $50k pricetag. Fast-forward to sunrise when the gang suits up, plunges into the water, and encounters their ultimate nightmare once a great white shark traps them deep within the Charlotte’s steel belly.

Hedén’s production trounces the medium-budget opposition regarding settings, primarily filming in flooded naval cruiser corridors or chambers. An opening 1940s flashback shows the USS Charlotte to scale before an enemy submarine’s torpedo blows it open, but after that, The Last Breath gets cheeky. We never gaze upon the Charlotte’s immensity in full like the Titanic. Writer Nick Saltrese sneaks an excuse into dialogue about how passing tropical storms remove enough sand to expose its upper-most entrance, with some handrails and an opening visible. No budget is wasted on recreating the Charlotte’s exterior for diving shots, diverting funds to the inner iron guts and empty mess halls where sailors once grabbed chow. Don’t expect the scale of Pearl Harbor or anything; it’s still a barebones rendition of cramped battleship quarters, but in comparison to other VOD shark flicks that rely so heavily on CGI to recreate even stormy skies? Hedén earns points for ensuring his locations appear intimidatingly authentic.

It’s a shame how inanimate objects feel more defined than Saltrese’s characters. The Last Breath is cornily dramatic to an excruciating fault, from Noah and Sam’s soap-as-all-heck romance to the moronic decisions that endanger the entire group while adventuring. The late Julian Sands is the only on-screen player with an ounce of presence — an injured, out-of-commission diver who knits red woolen caps as rehabilitation — while the rest of hunky Noah’s crew all behave as they shouldn’t because that’s the only what they’ll summon their great white attackers. Saltrese never cracks an organic scenario where Americans vacationing in the Carribean find themselves barricading pressurized metal doors in a sunken WWII relic — so he forces them into dumbfounding decisions that will probably get everyone killed.

‘The Last Breath’ Struggles With Both Sound and the Performances
Image via RLJE

Even worse, characters wear muffly scuba equipment for most of The Last Breath, and the film’s ADR techniques sound distractingly odd. Distortion filters replicate crackly communication systems built into their masks, but their line reads hardly echo the strain of swimming and speaking. It’s the same problem I had with The Deep House, where divers in a lake-flooded haunted house tank the experience with their soggy vocal dubs. Some lines play like they’re Metal Gear Solid transmissions, where Logan’s doing some overly cartoonish, clowny voice that’s a “yuck-yuck” away from being in an episode of The Simpsons. The cast’s masked-up speaking blocks any “natural” experience, not that The Last Breath should masquerade as a National Geographic advertisement.

Like most non-theatrical fin flicks, Hedén’s sharks are animated and hardly a dazzling wildlife spectacle. It’s far from on par with an easy comparison point like 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, where hungry alpha predators chase scuba divers. At best, the great white emerges from shadowy darkness on the opposite end of a bolted-shut tube, ready to lunge toward its next snack. At worst, and more often, the pixelated beast darts towards and past Noah or another victim, slicing their flesh or taking a passing bite. Digital artists struggle to blend Noah’s foe into underwater shooting tanks with real actors, which is a death blow for any shark-centric film.

Special effects crafters fare better with the gory wounds and blood leakage, especially when a brief bit of practicality allows for a severed arm, but the main attraction — what characters see before their last breaths — is a flimsy visual representation of the ocean’s greatest menace. On paper, The Last Breath seemed in Hedén’s wheelhouse. In practice, little differentiates The Last Breath from other ambitious “why are sharks here” blunders like the sunken airplane thriller No Way Up. Saltrese’s screenplay doesn’t rise above the bloated clichés seen floating around the razor-toothed subgenre for decades, which have especially been abused in the last few dismal years. There’s no buoyancy, pop, or exhilaration to The Last Breath, which feels like it’s running on empty from the get-go. Under Paris remains the only 2024 fin flick worth your time (so far).

REVIEW The Last Breath (2024) The Last Breath lacks the juice of the 47 Meters Down franchise despite taking aquatic horror cues and leaves us wanting so much more from this “Sharksploitation” mediocrity.ProsGore effects are on point.The locations do some heavy lifting.Julian Sands knows the movie he?s in (RIP). ConsThe shark itself is a mediocre digitization.Characters are boilerplate dummies.There?s a hokiness to the whole thing that never dissolves.

The Last Breath opens in select theaters and on VOD in the U.S. on July 26. Click below for showtimes near you.

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