‘The Last Photograph’ Review: DC’s Zack Snyder Comes Back Down To Earth

After so many years in the DC universe, Zack Snyder comes back down to earth again with a violent but surprisingly human action thriller set in the jungles of an unidentified Latin American country. Its plotline — more of which later — could go either way, and since the director has been unfairly accused of dodgy politics ever since the homoerotic jingoism of 300 (2006), many may expect this to be his Sound of Freedom, the QAnon-adjacent indie hit of 2023. Thankfully, The Last Photograph is no such thing; true, it is high on testosterone, and it centers on an almost ridiculously deadpan fella-drama bromance. But a better comparison would be Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), a slightly more morally complex story of life in a volatile ideologically captured warzone.

Snyder shot the film himself and it looks just great, starting out in the basement of a grubby restaurant basement where photojournalist Joe Wallace is being seduced into having sex with a waitress. Whether it’s because his artistic eye is drawn to a beautiful butterfly or down to the ton of smack he has just injected into his arm, Joe is oblivious to her advances, much to her annoyance. The sudden sound of gunfire makes him snap to attention; running up the stairs, camera at the ready, Joe finds that the child’s birthday party that’s being thrown has been attacked by guerilla gunmen, who shoot the adult guests and kidnap the two children present. Joe is by her side when their mother is killed, and he captures the moment, almost getting himself killed in the process.

The shockwaves from the incident reach a remote part of Scotland, where Ethan Black (Stuart Martin) is working on a sheep farm, commanding respect for his gentle rapport with the animals — right before he cuts their throats and chops up their corpses for dinner. We learn that Ethan’s brother, being the father of the birthday boy, was killed in the carnage, but that’s not, strictly speaking, the inciting incident that sends Ethan off on a revenge-o-matic killing spree. Rather, it is the fact that his sister-in-law — the woman in what will become a series of several “last” photographs, each with their own personal meaning — was the love of his life, leaving him after their one illicit fling with a Polaroid bearing the cryptic line “This is a photograph from that other world”.

Bent on tracking down the killers, Ethan flies over and heads to the photographic agency that represents Joe’s work. After paying out a bribe to find his whereabouts, Ethan finds Joe in a sleazy sex club, still bloodied and bruised after his brush with death. He has a deal to make; if Joe will come with him to identify his brother’s killers and rescue the two missing children, Ethan will pay him $10,000. Joe doesn’t take much convincing, not just because he needs the money, but because it soon becomes clear that a road trip with Ethan will feed both his adrenaline jones and cater to his prurient need for sensation, being largely deadened to the world of human relationships.

There are obvious echoes of Apocalypse Now in the story that follows, not just because there’s a literal journey upstream but because it’s all about the getting there and not the arrival: Both characters have a reckoning that awaits them. Along the way, Ethan opens up more and more about his past as a former DEA agent, telling stories that sometimes border on something out of Tropic Thunder, but as unlikely as it might sound, Martin is a surprisingly plausible as a soldier gone native, and whose once-tight bond with the local community has led him into the increasingly perilous situation he now faces. Fra Fee, as Joe, has slightly harder task, since his role is almost entirely reactive; while Ethan bangs on mournfully about, effectively, the dangers of shagging your brother’s wife — well, who would have thought? — Joe simply gets on with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of heroin, while Ethan mocks him for hiding behind his camera.

It doesn’t sound much like fun when you lay it out like that, but there’s certainly a lot of excitement, a fair bit of tension, and at least one very unexpected laugh-out-loud moment when a driver transporting them along the way asks the pair if they like “the king”. (Clue: It’s not Elvis Presley.) But although you can take the man out of DC, the DC is very still much inside this particular man, and the niggling problem with The Last Photograph is that it sometimes forgets about its characters in a bid to hit the furiously paced action set-pieces.

That said, though, it’s good to see Snyder trying something so far out of his wheelhouse (well, at least a bit far out of it), sharpening his sometimes rusty storytelling skills without the safety net of superhero pyrotechnics.

Title: The Last Photograph
Festival: Toronto (Special Events)
Director: Zack Snyder
Screenwriter: Kurt Johnstad
Cast: Stuart Martin, Fra Fee, Costanza Andrade, Marlon Moreno, Quique Mendoza
International sales agent: CAA
Running time: 2 hrs 15 mins