Life After Fighting

If you enjoy Seagal or Van Damme movies of the 80s and 90s, you'll probably enjoy this movie. It has plenty of fight scenes and just enough plot to keep things interesting. I enjoyed it quite a bit, some of the fight sequences do go on a little long. The acting is good and the plot is decent. Is it high art? No, but if you turn off your brain for 2 hours you will have a good time. The main character is an Australian martial arts champion who now runs a martial arts studio. He must fight off waves of bad guys, who are also apparently really good at martial arts. The plot revolves around child traffickers, but it's really about the fight sequences.

Well, I actually only stumbled upon this little gem because the guy in the poster from a far looked like a beefed up Clive Owen. Alas the guy is Bren Foster, who wrote and directed the film. Probably a passion project. And it shows.

Let me tell you, this was a surprisingly emotional ride.

Up front I was expecting a very B grade martial arts movie with a acting-wise very limited protagonist. This Bren guy pulled it off though.... There are quite some subtle scenes where you feel the inner turmoil in him.

The story is simple but does not shy away from quite ugly themes. And it kind of even crosses a line in between.

Of course, it revolves pretty much how you expect it, with the main guy virtually having super powers. But that does not detract from the movie.

But the absolute standout quality of this film is the direction of the fight scenes. They are very real, visceral und the physicality of them is conveyed very well. I caught myself twitching with some of the hits.....which is very rare. That is some A grade direction that does stand the comparison with the likes of The Raid 2, Ong Bak or Hong Kong movies.

It also gets surprisingly brutal at the end.

So watch out for this Bren Foster guy! Within martial arts movies, I see a bright future.

Melodrama. Action. More melodrama. More action. Rinse and repeat. Truth is, this has been the formulaic approach to this genre of film for the last 20 years or so. To make a fight film stand out, to make it POP, there has to be something unusual, something different. And LIFE AFTER FIGHTING 2024 offers that. The melodrama is still ... melodrama. But the action scenes are on fire. In fact, when the action starts, this reviewer gets a vibe not felt since BILLY JACK 1971, the original, and that is high praise. ((Don't forget to check out WARRIOR 2011 and KISS OF THE DRAGON 2001 on my list of all-time greats, if you have not done so already. Designated "IMDb Top Reviewer." See my list "167+ Nearly-Perfect Movies (with the occasional Anime or TV miniseries) you can/should see again and again (1932 to the present))

For an independent Australian film, Life After Fighting does action like nothing seen from the country before. The pacing of the film builds tension like a coiled spring for most of its runtime only to unleash with a truly unexpected fury that's well worth the wait.

There's clear influences from Hong Kong cinema in the care in creating investment in the characters before launching into the truly brutal fight choreography.

This will be known as a future classic of the genre and I can't wait to see where Bren Foster expands his craft next. The final action set piece will be rewatched and talked about for years.

What an interesting, original, and well acted beginning ! This movie could've gotten 10 enthusiastic stars, and it's a very enjoyable and unique film for the revenge genre, but ultimately some glaring cliches and too much cognitive dissonance drag it down out of the clouds :( I don't want to tell what happens, so let me just say it ends up the Action movie equivalent of a damsel running from danger who "trips" in the woods (hahaha) I mean damn, really ? Think about what the audience had to buy into to support your hero, and also if it's in like a thousand movies that doesn't mean it's a worthy plot device, all that means is there's a lot of mediocre and/or lazy writers creating content.