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.

Before I decided to watch Life After Fighting, I read some of the reviews here on the site. I didn't know anything about Bren Foster, so I didn't know what to expect, but I must say, he is awesome, and I am definitely going to watch some of his other movies.

Some reviewers called it a B-movie with fight scenes like an A-movie, and I can only agree. This film truly has some spectacular fight scenes with lots of cool kicks. I also thought the story and acting were pretty decent. Although the characters made some stupid decisions at times, I wasn't bored at any point or to annoyed with it. All in all, a very successful film.

With a tiny budget of 350 000 Australian dollars Bren Foster managed to create one of the best (if not the best) fight sequences in movie history! A criminally underrated screen fighter, fight choreographer, athlete and martial arts master that holds black belts in 5 disciplines (taekwondo, hapkido, brazilian jiu-jitsu, haidong gumdo, hwarangdo) and world champion gold medals in taekwondo and karate!

A new face in the action circus for me and an extremely likeable one at that. Where has this Bren Foster been all these years?

As a nostalgic caress, there is the cosy fighting school setting, which is the central element in almost every classic Eastern. But here we get more than the 10,000th blockbuster of the same content, and for the astonishing mini-budget of 350,000 Australian dollars. Our leading actor is also the director and attempts the difficult balancing act between martial arts action, thriller and drama. If I now add that this is spread over 125 minutes, most people will wave goodbye. Wait a minute! I don't want to claim that everything is perfectly rounded and that there aren't any long stretches, but overall Life After Fighting works surprisingly well. Potential audiences probably won't need the tragic core story, but it does give the brutal finale in particular a very special emotional depth. Speaking of the finale, wow, 40 minutes of a real martial arts highlight. More films please, Mr Foster!

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.