Today on the 5: I tend to enjoy watching shark horror films, which typically run from middling to terrible. Here and there I run across one that sounds interesting, which is what led me to watch The Last Breath. While the story itself is nothing new in any way, I still enjoyed it overall.
Ozone Nightmare
The Last Breath Spoiler Free Review
Welcome to your daily five for Tuesday, August 13th, 2024. Once again, and unintentionally, I have a pair of movie reviews that could not be more different films. One that's a very mainstream film and one that is maybe for 3% of the entire population of the planet. But let's start with the mainstream film. A 2024 release titled The Last Breath, which you can rent on Amazon for $7 as of this recording, which is what I rented it for. I had read that this was Julian Sands, the actor who I think he died in a hiking accident. He got lost and then ended up being found later. But of course, he was in Warlock, which is a really, really fun movie. If you've never seen it, he did a bunch of other movies, many roles. I reviewed him in that Dennis Hopper. I can't remember the title of it not that long ago, where I thought he was really good as the villain or one of the villains, but a very reliable and charismatic actor who this was, I didn't realize this was his last film, but I happen to see it in the trivia for it. But this is a movie that is a shark film. It is a shark based horror film, which of course, like every other shark based horror film, is inevitably and unfairly compared to Jaws. And if you're going to compare it to Jaws, just like pretty much every other movie that isn't Jaws, you're going to be disappointed in comparison to that film. But I don't know that that's really even fair. Look, Jaws is Jaws. The chances that we'll get another movie like that of that type, that's as good as that, are probably pretty remote. But if you can separate that comparison and just watch this movie for what it is, I would say it is a fun movie. It is not a great movie, nor is it a terrible movie. It is an entertaining, if very paint by numbers, horror film concerning people trapped by sharks. That's what it is. That's not a spoiler. That's right in the trailer. It's a group of people who go down and they are scuba diving in a World War II battleship when they suddenly realize that they are being pursued by sharks. There's your film. Nothing in this movie will likely surprise you in terms of what the story is. You will likely guess who's going to survive and who won't. You'll probably even be able to guess when in the film they're going to die because this movie is not trying to reinvent anything. But I will give the movie this credit because there are these times, I'll talk more about this on Friday, of course, when I get into the details of it. It does certain things that push it just above being completely middle of the road that make it more than just a, okay, it's just another sharp movie. And some of it is in the actual storytelling decisions, but in isolation, the story overall is, as I said, ABC. If anybody could plot this thing out, this story has been told a bunch of times the exact same way. But there are little story beats specifically that I think are better than you would expect. And I really enjoy the fact that they cast people who were able to emote very well when wearing scuba gear because the majority of the film, the main characters who were following are in full scuba gear. So all you can really see of them for the most part is their eyes. So they have to do their acting with their eyes. And in almost every case, they picked really good people for that. And that's probably something that most people won't appreciate enough because that's not easy. And they do it very well. You always know exactly who's speaking. Their emotions and their reactions are very well communicated through their eyes. And they did as far as I can tell, shoot all of these underwater scenes underwater with the actual actors who we see earlier, because many of them have distinctive kind of facial, like, their eyes are very, very recognizable. And so unless they found other people who just happen to be expert scuba divers who had the exact same eyes as these people did, I'm pretty sure these are the actors doing all their own work. And that's, again, something that is to be respected. It's not simple, I would think. And the fact that they didn't just green screen it or light tank it to simulate water, no, no, as far as I can tell, they're actually in the water unless they went through a tremendous amount of effort, faking bubbles and movement and everything else. And I really don't think so because there is a underwater photographer credited specifically for the film. So I'm pretty sure they actually did all these scenes. So while the story itself is, again, boilerplate simple, you have seen it before, nothing new here. The movie does things just enough things well enough or better than you would expect that I would actually recommend it for a $7 rental on Amazon. I don't feel like I spent too much on it. I got a good amount of entertainment. It was nice to see Julian Sands one more time. And in the end, I wasn't sorry I watched it. Is it a unknown classic? No, again, it treads very familiar around, but it does so just well enough where I think it does rise above what I've been. I mean, you know, how many shark movies have we seen? There are just tons of them in this one is just better enough that I would say seek it out 2024 last breath worth watching later.