If I told you I had survived Afterburn, would you believe it? Not the solar flare, though God knows, a good napalm blast might have improved things but the movie itself, which, for all its threat of global devastation, never generates enough heat or chaos to even scorch a popcorn kernel. It’s the end of the world as imagined by the world’s most slavish Second Unit directors: hulking men with enough metaphorical duck tape to keep the doors of Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic junkyard swinging well into the next ice age, and not a single brain cell set alight in the process.
The film’s pedigree is ghoulishly typical of our era’s cinematic inheritors, born from a comic most people have never read, passed from one set of swollen producer hands to the next, slipping in and out of development hell with the regularity of a soap opera cast list. There’s a certain sadistic curiosity in watching how a story, this supposed fusion of Mad Max scrap-iron and the lobotomized briskness of Army of the Dead could be passed like a party favor through the hands of directors with just enough style to rack up a body count, but not enough to spell their own names in the credits without a showrunner. For a movie about a world scorched and rebooted, Afterburn feels strangely untouched by anything as volatile as risk or imagination.
The plot if you can call it that, and only if you’re deeply content to see your intelligence plowed under in the first reel, riffs on the most threadbare imaginable: Jake (Bautista, too old now to really lumber, never mind sprint), a one-man moral salvage yard getting paid to dig up pre-apocalypse treasures, employed by titans of post-collapse commerce starving for status objects. Someone wants the Mona Lisa, there are warlords in France (because Americans still can’t imagine an Europe that isn’t a villain’s parade), and Samuel L. Jackson, here playing a “King of England” in a move that reeks less of wit than of a bored casting agent’s cocaine pick-me-up shows up long enough to sign a check and maybe, somewhere in the haze, deliver a monologue, though even that seems optimistic.
You offer the hope that the opening minutes look “good,” and I can only marvel at such optimism, as misplaced as planting a lemon grove in Chernobyl. Is it possible, for those precious first ten minutes, that Perry, the director, who once made Day Shift, an undead trifle at least shot with a vivid, guilty pleasure remembers how to build the gaudy, phantom pleasure of an action B-movie? Does the lighting flicker, the locations bristle? Perhaps, but then Olga Kurylenko who’s spent so many thankless late-career action roles projecting melancholic depth into scripts so thin you could slip them under a cell-door steps up, and hope, poor thing, rolls down the hill at terminal velocity.
The visual effects are not so much “bad” as career-ending. Witness the explosions, if “explosion” can refer to a single glowing lozenge bobbing across green-screened rubble. It’s as if someone’s uncle’s crypto start-up landed a contract for After Effects. Every frame that might have been a riot of carnage is instead an invitation to do your taxes.
And in the middle of this desolation: Bautista, who has reached that most precarious stage of the action career, the self-parody. He is not so much “bad” here, and he’s never been subtle, but exhausted, bulking through scenes that demand either an edge of wit or, failing that, a hammy sense of showmanship. His physical prowess has curdled into a kind of stubborn reluctance: he lumbers, he scowls, he tries, once or twice, to leap or duck or even quip, and every time you feel the terrible weight of repetition, that slow grind where once there was comic surprise.
And then, the deposed god: Samuel L. Jackson, whose only real action here is cashing his check. He rasps out a line, cocks an eyebrow, and is gone to what? A better film? Lunch? It says everything about Afterburn that a performer so reliably electric is here reduced to a flickering bulb in a dust-choked lamp.
The director, J.J. Perry, inherited a poisoned chalice, a project flickered through so many development stops, so many studio shake-ups (Gerard Butler! Tommy Wirkola! A post-production financing scandal that reads like a John Landis anecdote without the glamour or murder!), that one feels bad for everyone involved until the movie actually begins. Then, pity gives way to a kind of exasperated mirth: this is the film that emerged from all that effort? This is the Mona Lisa they finally hauled out of the rubble?
One could talk, if so inclined, of the genre, a post-apocalyptic action flick bought off the rack, air-freighted from some anonymous Netflix warehouse, so late to its own party it’s finding party favors left behind by The Book of Eli, the umpteenth Resident Evil, and every knockoff since the Reagan administration. All the conventions are ticked off: scavenger heroes, false societies, the Painted Lady of lost civilization in peril, smeary over-choreographed brawls that end in pixels and broken set walls. Even the supposed “ending” if you want to dignify the abrupt studio-financed cut-to-black as an actual finale, plays like an apology in search of a refund.
Worse, in its rare moments of clarity when Bautista and Kurylenko are allowed to remember their trade, to move or brood without the yoke of this witless plot, the film is merely serviceable, the sad fate of professionals doomed to spend their peak years as ballast in the streaming wars. There’s no pulse here, no curiosity, no madness, just the sullen adherence to the script’s vending machine cadence.
Somewhere, perhaps, in an alternate universe, Afterburn could have been trash worth celebrating, fabulous, delirious, cheeky, the kind of thing you watch with a bottle of supermarket wine and a love of camp. But here, in the overcrowded graveyard of Mad Max’s bastard children, it is simply, regrettably bad: the kind of ordeal that kills off whatever’s left of Saturday-night movie ecstasy, replacing it with the numb hope that the next comic property will, at the very least, have the sense not to come back from the dead.
