Zack Snyder is a peculiar director. His earliest work, such as Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen, and Legend of the Guardians, is easily his best and showed that he had the potential to become an exceptional action director. However, something about how Man of Steel was received—a film that I personally like—seems to have broken his brain. Instead of addressing the criticisms of his films, particularly their style-over-substance approach and overtly edgy storytelling, he doubled down on them. Since Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, his films have gotten progressively worse. I thought his disastrous Rebel Moon films represented a new low that no director could reach. I was wrong. Apparently, there is an even lower bar that Zack Snyder can set.
An ex-DEA operative named Ethan (Stuart Martin, Robin Hood) must return to the mountains of South America in an effort to find his missing niece and nephew, following the brutal murders of their diplomatic parents. Enlisting the help of a washed -up junkie war photographer named Joe (Fra Fee, Les Miserables), the only person to have seen the face of the killers, he sets out, determined to find the children and the truth before it is too late.
Before I dive into how terrible this film is, I want to offer Zack Snyder some career advice. Zack, if you’re reading this, I highly recommend switching careers from writer-director to director of photography. You clearly have a talent for making films that look visually stunning, regardless of how terrible the story may be. That talent is especially evident in The Last Photograph, where you make excellent use of wide-angle lenses and a naturalistic yet vibrant color palette. If you find yourself in “director jail” after this film, I genuinely recommend considering a career in cinematography. Unfortunately, the cinematography in The Last Photograph is the only compliment I have for this movie.
On paper, you would think this film would be an incredibly straightforward revenge thriller about a man trying to rescue his niece and nephew from the cartels. It would be cliché and formulaic, but probably the kind of movie that would become your dad’s favorite film for a month. However, Zack being Zack, somehow manages to take this simple, straightforward story and completely fuck it up. He fucks it up so badly that he has managed to make not only the worst film of his career, but one of the worst films I have ever seen.
The story, despite being laughably simple, somehow manages to feel like a convoluted, incoherent mess. Zack takes his captive audience on one pointless side quest after another, apparently under the impression that any scene can become meaningful if he shoots it in slow motion and drenches it in atmosphere. A quest could be Ethan shepherding sheep through the remote Colombian mountains for what feels like 20 minutes, Ethan making a sandwich for five minutes, or Ethan and Joe stumbling into a barbaric wedding featuring some deeply questionable practices ( we’ll get to later) that contributes absolutely nothing to the story. Then there’s Ethan casually explaining how an Amazonian tribe once believed he was Lightning Jesus. Because apparently, in Zack Snyder’s mind, that is essential information for a revenge thriller.
With so many utterly useless detours, the film becomes completely aimless. There is no sense of progression, urgency, or even a coherent narrative direction. The story simply wanders from one bizarre tangent to another, desperately searching for a reason to exist. What should be a lean, straightforward revenge thriller instead feels like watching someone flip through random pages of a screenplay that were never meant to be in the same movie. And as Zack becomes increasingly obsessed with these vibe-driven excursions, the story becomes even more contrived. There is no momentum because the film has no idea how to build it. It simply sludges from one set piece to the next, with barely any narrative thread connecting them. Events happen because the screenplay says they need to happen, not because the characters or story naturally lead us there.
And the worst part is that Zack doesn’t even bother to properly show most of these developments. Instead, he relies on enormous exposition dumps to explain the plot to the audience. Characters routinely stop whatever they’re doing to deliver chunks of dialogue explaining the world, their motivations, or some piece of backstory that should have been communicated through the actual filmmaking. The dialogue is clearly written with the intention of sounding intelligent, profound, and sophisticated, but it has the exact opposite effect. It sounds painfully stupid. It’s as if Zack is terrified that the audience might not realize how “deep” his story is, so he has his characters repeatedly explain it to us until the illusion collapses completely. Rather than trusting the audience to understand what is happening, he beats us over the head with exposition, all while the actual story continues to stumble forward without any direction, purpose, or momentum.
However, the convoluted script and terrible dialogue don’t even compare to the film’s worst crimes. The Last Photograph is an incredibly racist and misogynistic film. The local Colombian population is portrayed as a bunch of savage, barbaric people who apparently enjoy mutilating women, while the film also depicts them as pedophiles. It is an absolutely disgusting portrayal of an entire population that feels less like storytelling and more like an excuse to indulge in the most depraved stereotypes imaginable.
And then there are the women. Virtually every woman in this film is either naked, half-naked, sexualized, portrayed as a sex worker, or subjected to horrific violence. When Ethan has a flashback about his lover, she is naked in virtually every single scene. There is seemingly no reason for it beyond Zack wanting to sexualize her. The film repeatedly treats the female characters less like actual human beings and more like objects for the audience to look at or victims for the characters to brutalize.
At one point, we watch a woman have her teeth chiseled out one by one with a hammer and chisel. It is an absolutely grotesque sequence, and the film does virtually nothing to justify its inclusion. These scenes don’t meaningfully contribute to the story, develop the characters, or explore any worthwhile themes. They simply exist as grotesque spectacle. And honestly, the sheer frequency and gratuitousness of this imagery makes it difficult to interpret these sequences as anything other than some bizarre personal fetish on Snyder’s part. There is a difference between depicting disturbing subject matter for a legitimate narrative purpose and repeatedly lingering on the sexualization and brutalization of women because you apparently think it makes your film edgy or profound. The Last Photograph repeatedly crosses that line.
While I am glad Zack finally got the opportunity to make his independent passion project, a film that has apparently been in the making for over 20 years, that still doesn’t excuse the sheer lack of quality across virtually every aspect of this movie. Not even the half-asleep performances from the ensemble cast could make this thing remotely watchable. What is perhaps most infuriating, however, is that Snyder genuinely seems to believe he has created some kind of cinematic masterpiece. In reality, The Last Photograph is a cinematic abortion that feels less like a movie and more like a two-hour exercise in torturing its audience. It is the kind of film that seems to actively resent the people watching it.
Throughout the screening, there were numerous moments where the audience started laughing during scenes that were clearly intended to be serious. Audience members could be heard scoffing, groaning, and openly expressing their disgust. And this wasn’t some hostile audience predisposed to hate Snyder. This was an audience filled with Snyder Bros—the exact demographic that will defend virtually anything this man makes, regardless of how questionable the actual quality is. When even an audience this devoted to Zack Snyder starts laughing at your dramatic scenes and audibly groaning at your filmmaking, you know something has gone catastrophically wrong.
Will this film ever see the light of day and actually receive a theatrical release? I honestly have no idea. But if it does get announced for distribution, I’m putting my money on Angel Studios picking it up. Then again, if Zack has any sense, he should do exactly what he said during the film’s introduction: “Maybe we’ll just burn it.” And honestly, for the sake of his career, I would strongly recommend the latter option. At this point, permanently burning the film might be the only thing that can save Zack Snyder from being sentenced to director’s jail for the rest of his career.
My Rating: F
Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph had its world premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
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