Film Talk: Woody and Finn dive deep into survival thriller with Last Breath

​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.

Actors Finn Cole and Simu Liu completed intensive scuba training so cameras can linger close to their divers as they make split-second decisions to resolve a high-stakes predicament.

Saturation diver Chris Lemons (Cole) bids farewell to girlfriend Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) and boards the Bibby Topaz captained by Andre Jenson (Cliff Curtis).

He is allocated to the same dive team as retiring veteran Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson) and lone wolf Dave Yuasa (Liu) as the ship travels into the eye of a storm in the North Sea and uses dynamic positioning to remain over a pipeline in need of repair, located 330 feet beneath the roiling surface.

Chris and Dave descend hundreds of feet to the sea floor while Duncan remains in a diving bell and monitors umbilical cords supplying oxygen, electricity and communications to his teammates.

A fatal computer error leaves the Bibby Topaz drifting helplessly off course and Lemons’ cords are severed. He has around 10 minutes of oxygen.

“I will come back for you,” promises Dave before he is yanked back into the dive bell with Duncan.

They wait, with mounting dread, for Captain Jenson, first officer Hanna (MyAnna Buring) and dynamic positioning officer Michel (Josef Altin) to regain control of the ship.

Last Breath is a slickly engineered thriller that loses some of its buoyancy if you have seen the 2019 documentary and know how the story resolves.

Cole, Harrelson and Liu are well-matched as desperate comrades at the mercy of Mother Nature’s fury, who accept the risks every time they head out to sea.Underwater sequences, shot in an 11-metre deep dive tank in Malta, are staged with weightless brio.

The silence in darkened depths, where few safely venture, is hauntingly beautiful and agonising.

OPUS (UK 15/ROI 15A, 104 mins) ***

Released: March 14 (UK & Ireland)

Music is a global religion and its gods and idols have been preaching to the converted for decades.

Congregations answered the call when Elvis Presley’s swivelled his hips, The Beatles twisted and shouted, Elton John said farewell to his yellow brick road, theSpice Girls defiantly zig-a-zigged ahead, Lady Gaga teetered on the edge of glory, Taylor Swift shook it off and Harry Styles served generous slices of his watermelon sugar.

The cult of musical celebrity claims multiple victims in a tantalising thriller written and directed by first-time filmmaker Mark Anthony Green, which simmers with tightly coiled menace like Blink Twice and Get Out.

John Malkovich is deliciously cast as a flamboyant, platform-booted pop star, who returns to the public gaze to exploit the social media circus that has pitched its tent in the three decades since his self-imposed creative exile.

He sinks his pearly whites into Green’s meaty script, which takes satirical swipes at facets of popular culture but draws disappointingly little blood, especially in a haphazard final stretch that should – like a great pop song – leave us on a rhapsodic high.

Guitarist Nile Rodgers and The-Dream provide a songbook of groovy original music including infectious dance floor filler Dina, Simone (replete with Malkovich’s seductive vocals), which has been released to promote the film.

Art imitates life imitates art on an infinity loop of pitch-perfect branding.

Alfred Moretti (Malkovich), known affectionately as the Wizard Of Wiggle, retreated from the public eye 27 years ago with a Guinness World Record for the highest-grossing global tour in history and has remained a tantalising enigma.

His effusive agent, Soledad Yusef (Tony Hale), heralds the surprise drop of an 18th studio album, Caesar’s Request, with a listening party for honoured guests before the world basks in one of the great LPs of the modern era.

Gift basket invitations are delivered to TV show host Clara Armstrong (Juliette Lewis), powerful influencer Emily Katz (Stephanie Suganami), podcaster and former rock star Bill Lotto (Mark Sivertsen), veteran paparazza Bianca Tyson (Melissa Chambers), magazine editor Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett) and – curiously – his poorly treated junior writer, Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri).

The assembled throng travel to Moretti’s private compound in the Utah desert where they surrender mobile devices to protect “the authenticity of the experience” and are exposed to his cult-like doctrine.

Opus promises more than it ultimately delivers, but Green is a filmmaker with an intriguing, off-kilter vision, who isn’t afraid to get his hands messy in the slop of the human condition.

Tension builds gradually, spiking with a deranged puppet show featuring the voice of Rosario Dawson.

Edebiri’s sweet-natured scribe is one of few likeable characters in the escalating delirium but she feels underwritten, like a great verse missing a killer chorus.

BLACK BAG (UK 15/ROI 15A, 94 mins) ***

Released: March 14 (UK & Ireland)

Husband and wife are collateral damage of the spy game in a serpentine thriller written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh. George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is an operative working for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) run by Arthur Steiglitz (Pierce Brosnan), who learns from colleague Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgard) that there is a mole in the ranks. This double agent is responsible for stealing a software program named Severus and George must neutralise the threat.

A five-strong list of suspects includes George’s wife and fellow spy Kathryn St Jean (Cate Blanchett), Colonel James Stokes (Rege-Jean Page) and his girlfriend, NCSC psychiatrist Dr Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and his wife, NCSC communications expert Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela).

To expose duplicity, George hosts the suspects at a dinner party and laces one of the dishes with truth serum.

Loose tongues spill secrets and someone around the table wields a steak knife with intent.

IN THE LOST LANDS (UK 15/ROI 15A, 101 mins) ***

Released: March 14 (UK & Ireland)

Director Paul WS Anderson and his wife, actor Milla Jovovich, extend their screen collaborations with a fantastical adventure, adapted by screenwriter Constantin Werner from George RR Martin’s short story.

Powerful witch Gray Alys (Jovovich) escapes the noose at a public hanging and promises to grant the wish of scheming queen Melange (Amara Okereke): to retrieve an artefact that grants the power to shapeshift into a werewolf.