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 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.

Was EYE ever surprised by this movie...i had another one ready for when i would delete THIS one, after watching for, i thought, fifteen or twenty minutes. TOPS. But by that time i already knew that this was not just some shallow storytelling bolstered by the martial arts angle...no. There was a good story, as well... but the martial arts scenes were, in my opinion, very well done, as well...and, since a lot of the other reviewers are saying the same, i'm not hesitating to say it, as well... but, again, there's another story going on that's very worthwhile... i'm thinking that this guy...main character...director...has a future in the business...i can't imagine that this movie had a high budget... and i HOPE that if he DOES get his hands on some money beCAUSE of how well this movie does(and it SHOULD do well...kind of a Rocky, in its own right), that he will not lose perspective and keep it from going over the top... but he HAS to have discipline to get to where he is NOW...so i'm not all that worried that this would happen... so someone throw some money at this guy and let's see what ELSE he can do... by the way...just so you don't wonder...i live in the Netherlands and am in no WAY affiliated with him/the production...except, now, as a fan...i really WAS surprised... oh. And it WASn't 'flawless'...i thought the last scene...well...it COULD've been shorter if he'd done what EYE would've done in that situation...but i won't say anything else because i don't do spoilers...but i understand why he chose to do it the way he did... i still enjoyed it, otherwise... i came back to edit this...a six point TWO rating? How did THAT happen...a SEVEN i could tolerate but most of the review are at LEAST a seven...so what's up with THIS??? Do NOT be discouraged from seeing this movie if the subject seems interesting...it's got the moves and THEN some...

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.