‘Last Breath’ review: Underwhelming underwater adventure

Most moviegoers know how to game a movie. If you don’t see the villain’s dead body, for instance, there’s a chance he’s still alive. It’s the movie’s job to stay one step ahead and keep us wondering: What’s about to happen? Or, at the very least: How will we get to where we know we’re going?

“Last Breath,” an action-drama that unfolds in the depths of the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, can’t quite manage this trick. Based on the true story of a pipeline maintenance mission gone wrong, it has all the elements of a heart-pounding tale: a raging storm, a computer malfunction and a stranded diver with limited oxygen. Thanks to vaguely sketched characters and a narrative that comes with built-in limitations, however, “Last Breath” is more likely to have you checking your watch than gasping for air.

Our heroes are professional saturation divers who spend so many hours at depths so great that they must live in pressurized underwater cabins during the work week. It’s a fascinating milieu, or at least it would be if director and co-writer Alex Parkinson (working from his 2019 documentary of the same name) had answered one important question: Why would people do this dangerous, demanding work? We meet young Chris (Finn Cole, “Peaky Blinders”), grizzled Duncan (Woody Harrelson, enjoyably salty) and stoic Dave (Simu Liu, expressionless), but we never learn much about them, much less what motivates them.

While the three men work down below, the ship they’re tethered to suddenly goes adrift, yanking the divers this way and that. Chris tumbles to the seafloor and, in the film’s most riveting sequence, must scramble back to a rendezvous point before his last wisps of oxygen run out. Meanwhile, various crew members (including Cliff Curtis as Captain Jensen) search frantically for ways to retrieve Chris — or his body.

When the story hits its halfway point, moviegoers with even a modicum of sophistication will be able to predict exactly what Chris’s fate will be. That saps all tension from the movie and leaves us simply waiting for the story to play out. For the real participants, the events in “Last Breath” were surely life-changing. (One has become a motivational speaker.) For the rest of us, this underwater adventure will feel pretty underwhelming.