Film Talk: Woody and Finn dive deep into survival thriller with Last Breath
In recent years, he’s become one of my favourite actors. The man is just magic.
The world's favourite bartender, Woody Harrelson came to the fore on Cheers, opposite Ted Danson, back in 1985.
Seven years later he was putting Wesley Snipes through his paces in basketball classic, White Men Can’t Jump.
The following year, He and Demi Moore were receiving An Indecent Proposal from Robert Redford, and a year after that, our boy Woody and Juliette Lewis were raising unadulterated hell together as a pair of Natural Born Killers.
By the mid Nineties, Harrelson was a household name, and his widely recognised talent was only destined to grow and grow. He received his first Oscar nomination for 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, and his second for 2009’s The Messenger.
Fast-forward to 2017, and Harrelson pulled off a career-best performance (earning him his third Academy Award nom) in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Such was his chemistry with co-stars Frances Mc Dormand and Sam Rockwell that this film was instantly catapulted in to the ‘top ten of all time’ for many a critic, including myself. Indeed, Billboards is only one snowspeeder chase away from pipping The Empire Strikes Back to my top spot.
And of course, Woody has also done his padawanship in the galaxy far, far, away, cutting a fun rug as the mentor to a certain ‘scruffy-looking nerf herder’ in Solo: A Star Wars Story. This was in 2018. The following year, he cemented 36 months of stellar work with his first-class performance opposite Kevin Costner in Bonnie and Clyde thriller, The Highwaymen.
Since then Harrelson’s goose has kept the golden eggs coming, with Triangle Of Sadness and Champions. Now, director Alex Parkinson is hoping survival thriller Last Breath (also starring Peaky Blinders’ Finn Cole) will be the latest flick to benefit from Woody’s legendary stardust. Does this diving drama hit the usual Harrelson high, or has our boy sunk to a new low? Time to dip our feet...
LAST BREATH (UK 12A/ROI 12A, 93 mins) ***
Released: March 14 (UK & Ireland)
Film directors are rarely gifted an opportunity to remake their own work but Alfred Hitchcock masterminded two iterations of The Man Who Knew Too Much, 22 years apart, and Michael Haneke co-ordinated a shot-for-shot English-language remake of his diabolical 1997 home invasion horror, Funny Games.
In 2019, Alex Parkinson and Richard da Costa co-directed the edge-of-seat documentary Last Breath about a team of saturation divers – professionals who operate underwater for extended periods in a pressurised chamber.
The film combined archive footage, reconstructions, audio recordings and interviews to revisit an ill-fated September 2012 dive to the bed of the North Sea to repair a pipeline.
A nerve-shredding story of heroism provides rich source material for Parkinson’s solo narrative feature debut, distilling events that fateful day into a pulse-quickening adventure.
The script, co-written by Parkinson, Mitchell LaFortune and David Brooks, wastes precious few seconds of a watertight 93-minute running time on dry land, quickly establishing key characters to allow us to spend a good hour holding our breaths along with stricken characters.
