Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph Review feedzy_import_tag

This review is based on a screening timed to the Toronto International Film Festival. The Last Photograph does not currently have a release date.

A trudging revenge saga that points to self-critique, Zack Snyder’s long-gestating passion project The Last Photograph is filled with big ideas that go nowhere. Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in the hopes of finding a distributor, the film’s lone screening was preceded by an appearance from Snyder where he joked that TIFF’s audience might be the only ones to ever see it. Afterward, it felt more like a premonition, given the movie’s languorous 135 minutes of indistinguishable landscapes and unvarnished cinematic ugliness, which result in a film that feels much longer in practice.

Beginning at a child’s fancy, exclusive birthday party in Colombia, an American diplomat is shot dead, while his son and daughter are abducted by ruthless goons, who kill all the guests point blank — kids included. There’s an unflinching quality to Snyder’s depiction of violence here, but by opening The Last Photograph this way, it induces a numbing effect, wherein the bloodshed loses its luster after being repeated ad nauseam, with little variation. In an adjacent room, hired party photographer Joe Wallace (Fra Fee), an American in hiding, has sex with a waitress as the shots ring out, prompting him to zip up his pants and grab his camera just in time to see the diplomat’s wife, Catherine (Costanza Andrade), executed with malice. As she lays dying, he trains his lens on her and asks for forgiveness instead of offering help.

The big idea here is Joe’s calling to capture the world’s violence through his camera, though it’s not one that Snyder meaningfully explores, despite it frequently coming up. Joe isn’t even really the film’s main character; that would be the diplomat’s vengeful brother Ethan (Stuart Martin), a former special operative who was once involved with Catherine, and carries a topless polaroid of her in his pocket. It’s one of numerous instances of concocted, contrived female nudity; as much as Snyder might aim for tastefulness, he often veers towards titillation, a distinction emblematic of his “everything, all at once” heightened visual approach.

Working as a shepherd in remote mountains, Ethan learns of the deaths and kidnappings when Joe’s photograph of Catherine appears in a newspaper. So, he tracks him down in the hopes of identifying the killers and dealing with them himself, while rescuing the kidnapped children. What follows is, in theory, a perilous two-man journey across an unforgiving landscape. However, it ends up a meandering walkabout through thundering emotional emptiness, set against a bizarre, deeply racist concoction of South America populated by savage, predatory tribespeople who make for easy cannon fodder, continuing what some describe as a politically and culturally retrograde streak across Snyder’s filmography.

Joe and Ethan spend much of the movie side by side, though they barely speak to one another — except to state the movie’s themes out loud a dozen times — giving us a boring interpersonal dynamic that undergoes little metamorphosis by the end. The Last Photographs hints at the difficulty of change through its frequent shots (and tattoos, and TV broadcasts) of emerging butterflies, but like most concepts strewn across the movie, this ends up only skin deep.

An idea Snyder keeps returning to is Joe’s compulsion to shoot photos, alongside Ethan’s to shoot any target that moves, mirroring camera and muzzle flashes in moments of eruptive violence. However, both lead characters — gruff, stoic men who only express themselves in moments of severe anguish — are so closed off as to never form an actual relationship. It’s a buddy movie where the leads aren’t remotely friendly, or even really adversarial, leading to a joyless journey bereft of energy or allure.

Snyder tries, at times, to introduce questions of beauty and brutality coexisting, especially through the prism of Joe, but his alleged adrenaline junkiness is something spoken about in dialogue rather than actually expressed (the only thing we learn about him is that he’s a literal junkie; he shoots heroin in practically every scene). There’s never a moment of genuine thrill or curiosity when Joe pulls out his camera for the umpteenth time, as we never once see the world through his lens — an especially bizarre omission for a film that is, in part, an inquiry into photographic imagery.

The Last Photograph has been in development for 15 years, so it’s certainly not a knockoff of anything recent, but Alex Garland’s Civil War is a much more adept depiction of this idea. Instead of interrogating the need to capture images of violence — let alone the images themselves — Snyder instead loops back on some of the ideas he’s toyed with before, in big studio productions like Sucker Punch and Batman v. Superman. But his variations on these themes are never interesting enough to warrant an audiovisual retrospective. It’s really just more of the same, exactly as you’ve seen it before.

Martin, for his part, is appropriately gruff and imposing as Ethan, a ruthless killer with a past connection to this land, though not one that meaningfully informs his journey to rescue his nephew and niece. Granted, there’s an implied sincerity to the premise; Snyder, having dealt with the death of a child, imbues Ethan with a righteous fury that seemingly can’t be quenched, and a sense of nihilism that invades both characters’ psyches on occasion. But these moments of genuine psychodrama are few and far between. They usually make way for Ethan to dispense with his targets with extreme ease and proficiency, though the movie seldom lets these moments breathe; even as a series of righteous reprisals, there’s no fist-pumping adrenaline to the violence, or even mournful reflection. It’s just as-is; a whole lot of nothing, captured from an objective vantage.

For the most part, Snyder’s seemingly improvised cinematography (with its razor thin plane of focus) captures people, actions and events at their most functional and literal, despite the movie frequently hinting at a kind of forested fantasia through roving wide lenses that warp each space. However, nothing in the present sparks intrigue. Repetitive flashbacks are ultimately the flavor of the day, adding little to what’s already known, and weighing down the story in the process. Just when things threaten to get interesting by putting Ethan on the backfoot, he ends up with militarized support from former comrades who make his journey even easier.

Things certainly happen in The Last Photograph, in that it contains a handful of shootouts. But amid both the action and the shout-y drama, Snyder maintains little sense of place, turning each instance into an isolated snippet, rather than part of a meaningful whole. These scattered moments are interspersed with echoing stretches of nothing in particular, where the score (by Hans Zimmer, Omer Benyamin and Steven Doar) equals little more than errant rumblings, and the landscape photography adds few dimensions to what little already transpires between its stunted leads.

Joe and Ethan appear to be sides to how Snyder sees himself, as a man driven to both voyeurism and violent instincts. However, his indiscriminate use of tools like slow-motion — focused on everything from gunplay to Ethan making a sandwich — continues to plague him as a filmmaker, yielding a work of flattened feelings and images that fail to conjure the slightest emotion.