What’s It About
Set ten years after a solar flare wiped out technology across the globe, “Afterburn” follows ex-soldier Jake (Bautista), who works as a treasure hunter recovering valuable objects from the old world for powerful clients. His latest mission: team up with freedom fighter Drea (Kurylenko) to recover the Mona Lisa before an unhinged warlord gets there first.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Some films leave even the most devoted viewers questioning why they were ever made. Afterburn is absolutely one of those films. This post-apocalyptic action flick featuring Dave Bautista desperately tried to be fun and ultimately failed miserably. J.J. Perry’s first film, after an illustrious career as a stuntman, attempted to stage this movie like an action sequel, thinking that just because he could do car chases, it made him qualified to make a movie. He was mistaken. The post-apocalyptic story takes place 6 years after solar flares devastated the Earth by destroying all electronics. There were no cell phones, computers, or even today’s equivalents. The governments collapsed, which allowed violent warlords to seize control of the remaining continents. In this wasteland, Jake, played by Bautista, was just getting by, finding valuable things that wealthy people would pay for. Essentially, he was a treasure hunter in a world gone mad. Jake works for a crime boss who calls himself King August, played by Samuel L. Jackson. King wants Jake to travel from London to France to steal the famous Mona Lisa painting. Why does he want it? To use against another warlord named General Volkov, who controls France. Jake doesn’t want to take the job because he just wants to retire on his boat with his dog. However, King provides him with enough funding to realize his ambition, and Jake goes along with it. You can see right away that this film has some serious issues. Bautista, who appeared previously in the professional wrestling ring, proves once again that being big and strong does not make you a good actor. Bautista delivers each line as if he were reading a grocery list. No feeling, no personality, and certainly no reason to care about Jake’s fate. Jake is meant to be a brooding loner with a heart of gold, but Bautista plays him as if he’s a robot programmed to punch things. When Jake arrives in France, he meets up with a French fighter named Drea, played by Olga Kurylenko. She’s supposed to help him find the painting and fight off Volkov’s army. The problem is that Bautista and Kurylenko have zero chemistry together. Their romantic subplot feels forced and boring. Kurylenko occasionally says “merde” to remind us her character is French, but that’s about as much personality as the script gives her. The villain, General Volkov, is played by Kristofer Hivju from “Game of Thrones.” He is being portrayed as this dangerous warlord who rules France with an iron fist, but he appears more like some type of cartoon character. He plays chess, has bulging eyes, and even makes enormous banners with the letter V on them. It feels like the writers took every over-the-top evil villain trope from every war movie they’d watched and put them in his character. Samuel L. Jackson tries his best to save the movie during his few scenes, but even he can’t fix the terrible dialogue. King August is supposed to be this sophisticated crime lord who smokes cigars and drinks brandy, but his lines are so bad that Jackson looks embarrassed to be saying them. The fact that he’s barely in the movie for fifteen minutes shows that even he knew this project was doomed. Perry filmed the movie in Slovakia, which actually works well for showing a post-apocalyptic world. The country’s landscape really does look like civilization ended, so that part is believable. However, Perry wastes this good setting by focusing on boring action scenes instead of building an interesting world. We never learn much about how society collapsed or how people survive day to day. What we get instead are endless scenes of Jake shooting bad guys that explode into fake blood. The action scenes themselves are dull. Perry thinks that showing people getting shot in slow motion is exciting, but all it does is create a duller, longer event. There are car chases with jumps that look like they belong in “The Dukes of Hazzard,” except without the fun. One particularly silly part shows a tiny car moving across a map to show Jake and Drea traveling across France. It looks like something from a movie made thirty years ago. The story tries to copy better movies like “Mad Max” and “The Book of Eli,” but it completely misses what made those films work. Those movies had engaging characters and had something compelling to say about humanity after the disaster. “Afterburn”, however, consists of two hours of people shooting each other over a famous painting. The screenplay, by Nimród Antal and Matt Johnson, is based on a comic book, but they seem to miss what was interesting about that comic book. The dialogue is awful. Each line sounds like it came out of a bad video game. The characters don’t talk like real people, and their motivations are never made to make any sense. Why does King care so much about the Mona Lisa? Why does Volkov care one way or another about stopping Jake? The film doesn’t give us satisfactory answers. There’s a plot twist near the end that’s supposed to surprise us, but it’s so dumb that it makes the already weak story even worse. The ending tries to be emotional and meaningful, but by that point, you’ve stopped caring about any of these characters. A scene after the credits doesn’t add anything useful to the story. Perry has directed two other action movies, “Day Shift” and “The Killer’s Game,” and neither of those was very good either. “Afterburn” continues his streak of making loud, violent movies that forget to include things like good characters or interesting stories. He seems to think that if you blow enough stuff up, people won’t notice that everything else is terrible. The greatest letdown is that there was the potential for a decent movie. A group of treasure hunters in a world destroyed by humanity has potential. A story about discovering art & beauty after the fall of civilization could be really captivating. Unfortunately, Perry and his writers were more interested in just blowing things up than exploring those ideas. “Afterburn” is the type of movie that makes you appreciate the good action movies. It highlights how difficult it is to execute exciting action scenes when there aren’t any interesting characters or a coherent story to drive it all together. Bautista may be fine in supporting roles in which other actors can manage the dramatic weight; however, he is not an action star.
OUR RATING – A LOST TWO HOURS 2