Certain movies don’t entertain; they happen to you—a mugging in the parking lot of your own expectations. “Aftermath” is that kind of disaster: a movie so resolutely, invincibly witless that it may single-handedly set the action thriller back to before the invention of the bridge. Patrick Lussier’s slab of hostage nonsense is something you don’t so much watch as endure, like a flood in your basement when all you wanted was a cold shower.
You know the template—terrorists, tightly-wound bridges, a brooding hero (Dylan Sprouse, bringing about as much hurt as a stubbed toe), some stale leftover of a theme (PTSD, because “depth” is now officially a line item on the Budget Spreadsheet of Mediocrity), and a cast so marooned by the writing they start to look like prisoners in a community theater adaptation of “Die Hard.” It’s the kind of project where even the bridge might wish to collapse out of shame.
Oh, the PTSD. Ordinarily, when a movie invokes trauma, you brace for the ache—some true south-of-the-heartstring vibrato. Here, it’s a Post-Traumatic Script Disorder: the hero’s wounds are badges sewn from TV Guide clichés, trotted out when the story threatens to drown in its own bathos. This is not trauma explored; it’s an Instagram filter slapped on the script: click “empathy,” add sepia tone, move on. We’re meant to believe war takes men apart. “Aftermath” only takes them out—for pizza, maybe, if there’s time between gunfights.
But screw character when there’s plot! Or rather, what passes for one. The supposed engine of the script is Mason Gooding’s Jimmy, whose master plan is so riddled with gaps you could drive one of those bridge transport trucks right through it—backwards, blindfolded, and still end up in another, somehow stupider action movie at the other end. What are these mysterious documents? What is Jimmy’s deal with his imprisoned soldier pals? Apparently, things went sour after an especially nasty game of Risk. You’re not watching a thriller so much as a scavenger hunt for lost exposition—Dora the Explorer would beg for a map.
And the villains! Oh, the ex-military “special forces”—a lumpy clown car of tactical expertise and hair gel. Every time another black-clad “henchman” goose-steps onto the scene, you half-expect Yakety Sax to start playing. Never has a cadre of killers shuffled through so many gunfights with the collective poise of a busload of vaudeville pensioners. I’d invoke the Keystone Kops, but those gentlemen could actually land a hit.
Then there’s Gooding, gripping his role as the unhinged villain with the bare hands of Melodrama 101. Jimmy is all ticks and chest-thumping, his big “pushes” toward his fellow mercenaries done with enough trembling faux-bravado to make an under-rehearsed production of “West Side Story” look like Bob Fosse’s last will and testament. As for the grim addition of “Jimmy is dying of cancer”—this movie works so hard for gravitas it practically tips over and smothers itself under a pile of its own pill bottles. The “medicine” scenes aim for raw; they come out rawhide.
Dylan Sprouse’s Eric, meanwhile, gives one of those performances that makes you wonder if the actor suffered from a concussion halfway into the shoot—so glum, so adrift in his own mopiness that any spark of charisma is snuffed out by the overwhelming weight of directorial indifference. He looks like he’s been told about the plot of “Die Hard” from an unreliable friend, then sent into the room, scriptless, on a dare.
The dialogue? A crash course in accidental comedy, every attempt at urgency thunking to the ground like a sandbag in a silent movie. The “big” emotional moments have all the dramatic heft of a cereal commercial’s second take—achingly earnest, excruciatingly hollow. Did anyone imagine these lines would ever read as anything but an audition for the International Society of Unintentional Laughter?
“Aftermath” wants to drop us into an action inferno—ordinary lives torn apart, soldiers haunted by the past, rampaging antiheroes with wounds deeper than the East River. It doesn’t give us any of that. What it does, beautifully, is wring every drop of tension out of the genre and replace it with inertia: a still life in bullet time, a hostage situation where the only thing taken as prisoner is the audience’s goodwill.
Movies, when they fail this grandly, can sometimes circle into the realm of so-bad-they’re-good cult pleasures. “Aftermath” doesn’t even achieve that. It’s a failure stripped of camp value or novelty, a shoddy blueprint for the workflow of creative bankruptcy. You marvel at how a film can be so simultaneously frantic and inert, so desperate to matter and so unmoored from any emotional reality, like a fireworks finale set off in an empty stadium.
Spare yourself, unless you crave an object lesson in just how many things can go wrong when “action” is a synonym for “squandered potential.” There may come a time when someone unearths “Aftermath” as a cautionary masterpiece in film schools: watch what happens when possibility meets inertia, and loses. For now, my advice: duck and cover. Avoid this film like you would radioactive waste, or an invitation to a second screening. There are turkeys that could tap-dance with greater poetry—and they’d have the decency to end on time.
