Kritiken

Last Breath is a midsize version of a large-scale thriller, one that isn’t afraid to seem boring, and I mean that as a major compliment.

While the documentary was slightly shorter than the feature, it gives us a more complete – and satisfying – portrait of this emotional journey than the movie ever will.

Narrative remakes of documentaries are right up there with live-action remakes of animated features when it comes to cinema’s most pointless genre... If there was a case to be made that Parkinson could find some new element of this story by telling it as fiction, Last Breath fails to make it.

As far as I can tell, this is the director’s first fully narrative effort, but he has clearly used his familiarity with the original events, as well as perhaps a professional dedication to capturing reality, to his advantage; there’s a documentary-like clarity to every scene.

[I]n a perfect world, this new Last Breath would actually complement the doc rather than be in competition with it... [but] The dramatized version simply floats, roils and plods forward as if being tugged dutifully along, ticking off checkpoints along the way. That IRL ending still reads as miraculous. Yet the whole thing feels still feels starved for creative oxygen.

The makers of the based-on-a-true-story diving rescue drama “Last Breath” deliver precisely the kind of movie you’ll likely expect from a contemporary men’s adventure melodrama.

Last Breath is a gripping disaster flick of routine, improvisation and unfathomable experience – the participants shockingly cool under pressure, as the viewer descends into deep, deep stress.

A pulse-pounding, high concept bio-drama, Last Breath is a commendable technical feat, though its melodrama falls short.

A movie of barely sketched personalities and trite emotional stakes... “Last Breath” is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic.

Last Breath plays things by the book, a typically tense survival drama with all the terrifying missteps and inspiring moments of human endurance that go with it.

Unfussy performances from Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu and Finn Cole highlight a film that draws on familiar tropes to tell a compelling, surprisingly touching story.

If you don’t already know the ending of the story, Parkinson delivers a film in which it feels like we genuinely don’t know how this will end, with certain sequences that are sickeningly suspenseful.