We get two post-apocalyptic action films starring Dave Bautista as a loner hero crossing a barren wasteland and taking a long train trip this year! First was Paul W.S. Anderson’s phantasmagoric George R.R. Martin adaptation In the Lost Lands, and now we have Afterburn, a much less visually bonkers addition to the subgenere that’s nevertheless a good chunk more coherent and occasionally even fun.
Bautista is Jake, formerly one of the world’s greatest treasure hunters. But six years ago a massive solar flare shut down the world, and now warlords control all the cities and everyone scrambles for resources. Jake sometimes works for King August (Samuel L. Jackson), as in an opening sequence wherein he retrieves a valuable antique violin from some long forgotten vault. Jake just wants to be left alone, so when August offers him the chance to walk away scot free and live out his dream life on a boat, sailing away, he signs up to parachute into enemy-controlled France to recover the Mona Lisa (yes, that one, but also no, not that one. Spoiler).
What follows is a reasonably amusing Escape from New York knockoff, with Bautista cracking wise while narrowly escaping one gang of weirdos after another. At one point he teams up with a rebel named Drea (Olga Kurylenko) who seems to know more than she’s letting on about the mission, which turns out to be at least in part to stop the treasure from falling into the hands of fascist warlord Volkov (Kristofer Hivju). Director J.T. Perry does a lively job of keeping the action moving, and there are two or three really amusing car chases as Jake and Drea outrun the mobs of bad guys in a souped-up bulletproof ATV. Lots of sweet jumps, explosions, and car pulls, and they all mostly look great. Perry makes the most of what’s clearly a very limited budget (some later VFX during a climactic train battle are particularly dodgy).
It won’t surprise you to hear that this material is overall thin, but there’s a bit of extra disappointment that some of the best little bits of interest — like Jake’s dog Smokey, or an implied history between Jake and August’s adjutant (Eden Epstein) — that wind up as narrative dead ends. Why show us a gang of parkouring cannibal psychos and then not have our heroes wind up in a big fight with them? Gigantic missed opportunity. Still, Afterburn has just enough personality to keep itself tasty.
DIRECTOR: J.J. Perry; CAST: Samuel L. Jackson, Dave Bautista, Olga Kurlyenko; DISTRIBUTOR: Inaugural Entertainment; IN THEATERS: September 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
Comments are closed.