The Last Breath (2024)

The Last Breath (2024) is another shark thriller. Five friends get together to enjoy a weekend of partying on a beautiful Caribbean island. On a scuba-diving trip amidst the wreckage of a Second World War ship, what they discover exceeds their worst fears: great white sharks are on the prowl. The group finds itself trapped with little oxygen supply. They will have to fight these predators to their last breath.

Of course, some will still say that the film takes too long to get going. But if you want to see a film where there’s nothing but non-stop action from the very start, there are surely other things to get your teeth into. But as far as I’m concerned, I think the film’s preparation, construction and set-up are really very well done.

That said, this film is far from being a masterpiece. Which category should it fall into? Horror film? Not a single bristling hair. Thriller? We already know the bad guys. Adventure? Everything happens at the bottom of a swimming pool.

On a more serious note, I was caught up in the story and experienced the events at the same time as the protagonists. But what I found most disappointing were the sharks… even though I watch films like this for them. If everything is great in a feature film, but not the creatures… it’s half a failure! It’s not a blockbuster, but the special effects are pretty rubbish most of the time, even if the whole thing doesn’t make a complete fool of itself. It’s amazing how many crap films have been made in this genre!

Once again, the poster is misleading, but it’s almost a traditional law. We’d love to see something as terrifying as these drawings, but we’re a long way from that.

Four years after the enjoyable ‘Breaking Surface’, Joachim Hedén is not done with underwater scares, even if ‘The Last Breath’ doesn’t quite live up to his first feature. After the two sisters, it’s the turn of a group of friends to find themselves in a state of panic as they explore the wreck of the USS Charlotte, a battleship from the Second World War. It’s the same race against time to reach the surface, but the lack of oxygen is no longer the only threat in this fight for survival, with a greater danger lurking around the corner. The main difference between the two films lies in the quality of the underwater scenes, which is obviously the most important. Here, the scenes are too murky and muddled, which is really annoying. As for the characters, most of them are very annoying, even if you don’t really know who’s who when they’re underwater. You only recognise them by their voices! There are a few ill-advised reactions, but they’re nothing to laugh at either.

Moreover, this deadly dive among the sharks is not among great whites as usual, which is a little original, different from what we are usually served. The tension is appropriate, but never overly distressing or anxiety-provoking.

At the beginning, there’s a semblance of a script, then nothing, we find ourselves in the wreck and it’s just a series of scenes of survival against the sharks. In short, a very average film, not too good, not very original… but we’ve seen so much worse!

Note that Julian Sands is in this film! A prolific actor, known since 1985 for Warlock and its sequel, he appeared in two episodes of the Ghost Whisperer series and also played in my favourite spider film: Arachnophobia (1990). You could really say that this was his last dive. A keen mountaineer, he was reported missing on 13 January 2023 after hiking Mount Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains, 80km north-east of Los Angeles, California. Police searches were initially unsuccessful due to very poor weather conditions, but his body was found by hikers on 24 June and formally identified three days later.

We don’t see much of him in this film… but the heroic gesture he makes to save someone is highly symbolic.