Life After Fighting

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!

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.

Not that long ago i saw the trailer for this movie and remembered the lead actor from a movie i saw with Steven Seagal call Force of Execution about 10 years ago or so. He was very solid in it in term of fighting but for whatever reason, its like he never really did anything more when it comes to Martial Arts? After watching his IMDB resume it seem he spent lots of years in recurring roles in TV shows so that could explain.

Fast forward many years later and this one finally get release, so i give it a rent on Xbox (i couldn't buy it even if i wanted to for whatever reason, rental only) and this really surprised the heck out of me.

I mean the trailer did showed some good fight sequences but with DTV martial arts flick you never know. But i was actually blown away.

The movie has a rather surprisingly long run time for the genre at 2h, but it want to establish the characters well so you feel for them. It still manage to insert enough fight scenes and training scenes in that first and second act that i never felt bored or that it moved too slow.

Once you get in the third act tough is where the show start. BRUTAL fight scenes, fast pace, great choreographies. I read in some other reviews that there was too much "shaky cams" but i think the guy may have had a few beers too much because i didn't notice much shaky cams at all. Yes sometimes the camera follow the action and its not completely steady but its not "shaky" at all.

Story touch on some hard subject and without reinventing anything, it is solid enough to be a base for the action show.

Bren Foster not only star in it, but also directed and written it, so it was really a passion project for him and he succeeded at making a very good modern day Martial Art movie mixing both old school kicks and flips with a more grounded BJJ style of modern MMA.

Other than Scott Adkins its been pretty dry outside of Asia when it comes to this genre. You got Michael Jai White putting one out here and here, but for some reasons he appears often as a guest star in non-martial art movies (i assume he don't want to be type casted) and when he do put one, they not always exactly great. Some are very low budget and it show.

I don't know how big was the budget for Life After Fighting, but even tough there is nothing extremely expensive in it (explosions, car chases or big action set piece), everything they done especially the climax really look great and its very well directed when it comes to the fights.

If i must mention a negative, i would say Bren Foster altough an amazing on screen fighter, lack a bit in term of acting when it comes to emotions, but then again you don't watch a movie like this for academy award type of actings. It was fine enough.

Overall this is one i will like to add to my physical collection so hopefully i can get at least a DVD at some point. And i do hope Mr Foster make more martial arts movie in the futur.

Well after watching the trailer I was not going to bother to watch it as it looked awful .

But I went against my gut feeling and settled down to watch.

I was pretty surprised to be honest, the fight scenes were well choreographed, the acting and story were so so.. The movie how ever did seem to be a little long with scenes that were not needed.

The story was a little bit odd at times and not enough character backgrounds.

But if all you are after is a Friday night action movie with some good fights and a movie that's not bad but not great, then this movie will be up your street and worth watching.

I have now re named bren foster as the Australian Scott Adkins.

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.