Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph Review

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.

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