Woody Harrelson has a new survival thriller out this Friday, and it just debuted with his best Rotten Tomatoes score in years

A new survival thriller starring Woody Harrelson has earned his best Rotten Tomatoes score in some time. Harrelson is a multifaceted star who first rose to prominence as part of the cast of the iconic sitcom Cheers, playing bartender Woody Boyd from season 4 through the series finale in season 11. Before the end of the show, he had already established himself as a rising movie star, having appeared in titles including 1991's Doc Hollywood and 1992's White Men Can't Jump.

Since Cheers ended in the early 1990s, the number of Woody Harrelson movies has skyrocketed. This includes commercial hits like the Hunger Games franchise, the Now You See Me movies, and 2012, but also critical darlings including the three movies that earned him Oscar nominations, namely the biographical drama The People vs. Larry Flynt, the war movie The Messenger, and the Martin McDonagh crime drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. His ability to embrace a multitude of genres extends to his new survival thriller, which is his latest movie to appeal to critics.

Last Breath Has Debuted With A Strong Rotten Tomatoes Score

The Underwater Thriller Has Won Over Critics

Last Breath has been well-received by critics. The 2025 survival thriller movie stars Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu as deep-sea divers who must mount a rescue mission when an operation goes terribly wrong and their crewmate (Finn Cole) is trapped underwater without oxygen. The Last Breath release kicks off on the last day of February. Although it is the biggest release of the weekend, it has major competition in the form of holdover titles including Cpatain America: Brave New World, The Monkey, Paddington in Peru, Dog Man, and Ne Zha 2.

Ne Zha 2 is a Chinese animated movie that recently surpassed Pixar's Inside Out 2 to become the highest-grossing animated movie of all time worldwide.

Rotten Tomatoes has now aggregated enough reviews for Last Breath to have an official score. At the time of writing, 24 different critics have weighed in and collectively given the movie a solidly Fresh 83% score with an average rating of 6.8 out of 10. While the score could fluctuate as more reviews are added, it is currently Woody Harrelson's best score for a non-documentary movie since 2017, when he starred in both Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (90%) and War for the Planet of the Apes (94%). Below, see a breakdown of his scores between 2017 and 2025:

Title	RT Score
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)	69%
Venom (2018)	30%
The Highwaymen (2019)	58%
Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)	68%
Midway (2019)	42%
Kate (2021)	46%
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)	58%
The Man from Toronto (2022)	23%
Triangle of Sadness (2022)	72%
Champions (2023)	59%
Suncoast (2024)	77%
Fly Me to the Moon (2024)	65%
Last Breath (2025)	83%

What This Means For Last Breath

It Could Strike A Chord With Audiences

Finn Cole, Woody Harrelson, and Simu Liu sit together in their diving gear in Last Breath

While the Woody Harrelson movie's average score is somewhat middling, it has received quite a bit of unalloyed praise as a meat-and-potatoes thriller. In fact, in Mae Abdulbaki's Last Breath review for ScreenRant said that it "made me sit at the edge of my seat in anticipation." This kind of praise and attention from critics could mean that the movie will strike audiences in the same way, making it a word-of-mouth hit that could overcome its current weak projections that show it premiering below week 3 of Captain America: Brave New World with a sub-$10 million debut.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes