Zack Snyder’s Lifelong Passion Project Gets Terrible Reviews
Snyder's latest movie, The Last Photograph, is being torn apart after debuting at TIFF
Zack Snyder’s long-in-development film The Last Photograph debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and the response has not been pretty. Early reviews and write-ups have called the Justice League director's latesta torturous slog, dragged down by disastrous direction and rotten politics. An X user even went as far as saying, “The worst movie of Zack Snyder’s career is always the next one.”
Film programmer and host of the Sleazoids podcast, Josh Lewis, wrote on X, “Pains me to report that Zack Snyder spent 25 years trying to make his war journalist mercenary take on Apocalypse Now and The Searchers and the final result was functionally indistinguishable from Sound of Freedom.”
“Borderline embarrassing TIFF let in The Last Photograph. Absolutely abysmal,” critic Nate Adams wrote. “Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph is grotesque, shameless and an utter disgrace from start to finish,” entertainment TikToker DawsOn added. “It is Snyder at his most unfiltered, with no studio intervention and is the film's largest problem. It’s desperate to be Snyder’s Civil War, but feels like Daily Wire slop filled to the brim with shock value.” As expected, Snyder’s social media task force quickly mobilized in his defense, as X users who hadn’t seen the film went after critics who panned it.
What is The Last Photograph about?
The Last Photograph’s official synopsis reads as follows:
An ex-DEA operative must return to the mountains of South America in an effort to find his missing niece and nephew, following the brutal murders of their diplomat parents. Enlisting the help of a washed-up junkie war photographer, the only person to have seen the face of the killers, he sets out, determined to find the children and the truth, but soon learns he must also face the ghosts of his past. Their journey into the unknown takes them further and further away from civilization, bringing into question everything they believe, while slowly eroding the distinction between real and surreal.
An ex-DEA operative must return to the mountains of South America in an effort to find his missing niece and nephew, following the brutal murders of their diplomat parents. Enlisting the help of a washed-up junkie war photographer, the only person to have seen the face of the killers, he sets out, determined to find the children and the truth, but soon learns he must also face the ghosts of his past. Their journey into the unknown takes them further and further away from civilization, bringing into question everything they believe, while slowly eroding the distinction between real and surreal.
The film stars Stuart Martin as Ethan Black, an ex-DEA agent after revenge, and Fra Fee as a troubled photographer. Snyder has been working on the movie on and off for the better part of two decades. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that he first came up with the concept in the mid-2000s and shelved it in 2016 before self-producing the picture through his company, The Stone Quarry.
Snyder’s most recent films — the sci-fi duology Rebel Moon — received the worst reviews of his career, sitting at 22% and 16% on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively. His filmography has been up and down, to say the least, with his highest-rated movies being 2004’s Dawn of the Dead at 77% and Zack Snyder’s Justice League at 71%. Six of his movies have received positive Rotten Tomatoes scores, while eight are rotten. Snyder’s next project is a reboot of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.