Final Rating: 1/5
A former DEA agent travels to Colombia to avenge his brother and sister-in-law, teaming up with the conflict photographer who captured their final moments in Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph.
Photograph opens with the raid of a birthday party by a paramilitary group, who kill everyone. Everyone, that is, except for photographer Joe Wallace (Fra Fee), who is shot while snapping a photo of one of the gunmen. The bullet goes through his camera, stopping before it enters Wallace’s head, but destroying his film.
Shortly thereafter, Wallace is approached by Ethan Black (Stuart Martin), a rough-looking former soldier who lost his brother in the earlier assault. Black is intent on tracking down his brother’s killer, and enlists Wallace’s help, hoping he’ll recognize the villains by recalling his camera’s last photograph.
Snyder not only directs Photograph but also serves as cinematographer. Snyder has an eye for photography, scattering frame after frame of perfect wallpaper material throughout the film. Gorgeous Colombian vistas, aesthetic shots of country folk living their lives, even a strikingly beautiful image of a cave skylight framed to look like a camera lens. Snyder occasionally opts for sections of low or no dialogue to just show off the locations he got to visit while an orchestral score by the team of Hans Zimmer, Omer Benyamin, and Steven Doar swells in the background.
On the one hand, it’s always nice to see pretty imagery. On the other, Snyder’s tendency to let shots linger for too long compounds his other weaknesses. Photograph is paced like a snail’s dream: it’s slow and connections between events are so loose they often seem random. Black’s revenge leads him to drift from place to place, targeting a series of individuals that provide convenient opportunities to pause the action, rather than building on existing relationships.
For example, at one point, Black and Wallace meet the leader of a small militia. Snyder breaks into a flashback that barely includes the militia man, before dropping the character entirely and having his leads move on.
There’s little to care about in the supporting cast, but not much more from the leads either. Black starts as a generic tough guy, mostly staying that way until a bizarre sequence reframes his backstory into an aesthetics-first take on Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. “Aesthetics-first” because Black is portrayed as someone who went to live with native Colombians, eventually “going native,” but Snyder shows little interest in that idea beyond a boost to Black’s viciousness. Other flashbacks work to make Black more badass, but don’t build on each other beyond that.
Wallace is world-weary, a junkie, possibly suicidal, useless in a fight but eager to come along. He plays second-fiddle to Black, and his occasional flashbacks don’t show as much growth – or more accurately as many sides – as his partner.
Wallace is passionate about photography. His job involves freezing conflict in time. He takes a voyeuristic approach to the world and his work, excited to follow around anyone who seems interesting enough to photograph. One of Wallace’s first scenes has him bring up his camera in response to seeing someone point a gun at his face. He’ll float on the sidelines of Black’s fights, just to get more pictures.
As a commentary on photojournalism, Photograph is damning: the photojournalist craves combat he cannot take part in, the moral compass that might guide his reporting replaced with a lust for cool images.
Wallace also gets the most revealing line in the film: “Politics creep me out.” Photograph is politically careless at best. A few named Colombians exist in the film, largely as terrorists and opportunists. One even requests diplomatic immunity – or rather “extradition to the US to face justice in the courts.” Others are portrayed as barely human, more like bodies that inhabit the land, occasionally saying something cryptic.
Those descriptions don’t cover the women, though. More often than not, nothing covers the women: Snyder is adept at finding reasons for them to take their shirts off. In fact, the last photograph Black has of his brother’s wife is a sad shirtless pic she snapped for him the last time the two met. We see that picture a lot.
The woman with the largest role is murdered at the start. Other women show up either to be ogled or assaulted. The only trans character – a surprising inclusion at all – runs a brothel heavily implied to be a base for child sex traffickers.
The supporting cast in Photograph exist to make the lead badasses cooler. Snyder is so obsessed with making his leads look cool that he’ll shrink the world so they can stand a little taller. So obsessed with crafting cool visual facades he forgets to put anything behind them. Unfortunately, cool does not equal memorable.
The Last Photograph was seen during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
