A cat burglar must steal the Mona Lisa to finance his dreams of sailing the world—currently a dystopian wasteland—in Afterburn, which opens in Prague cinemas this weekend after debuting in selected territories last month. This ridiculous post-apocalyptic heist movie boasts a couple well-choreographed action scenes and some neat location filming in Bratislava, subbing in for locations in France, but has precious little else to recommend it. Coming off the back of proficient actioners Day Shift and The Killer’s Game, this latest outing from stunt coordinator-turned-director J.J. Perry is an unfortunate dud.
Afterburn stars Dave Bautista as the (purported) cat burglar, Jake, who uses his sleuthing skills to penetrate a London safe and lift a Stradivarius violin in the film’s opening scene. He’s ambushed by some Clockwork Orange hooligans before he can make a getaway, and puts his real brute force skills to use: blasting off their faces with a shotgun and grenades.
Why do the hooligans want the violin? Why does Jake want it? Well, it’s six years after solar flares have disabled all electronics across the world, and the Earth has devolved into a dystopian hellscape run by warlords. One of those warlords, King August (Samuel L. Jackson), will pay good money for rare and formerly valuable artifacts, in order to, uh, preserve the best of humanity. Or something. But really, we get the feeling that he’s just a collector.
Jake doesn’t care about precious artifacts, but he does have dreams of fixing up that sailboat he’s been working on and hightailing down to tropical waters, and King August pays him well with small bags of boat supplies in exchange for pulling off these elaborate and deadly heists. This arrangement seems so much more complicated for Jake than just, you know, maybe using those skills to track down the gears and whatnot he needs himself, but it’s his prerogative.
Next target for August: nothing less than the Mona Lisa, which the French government put into hiding when the world went to shit. And all Jake needs to do to get that sailboat fixed up is hop on a plane to France, drop into occupied territory by parachute through a hail of gunfire, make contact with the resistance movement, track down a series of clues, and outrun and outgun an entire army led by sadistic Russian warlord Volkov (Kristofer Hivju).
See, the hidden vault that contains the Mona Lisa also happens to contain food and supplies, desperately sought by French rebels led by Drea (Olga Kurylenko, decked out like a 1980s action heroine), as well as the weapons of mass destruction that would give Volkov untold power. And Jake is the only man in Europe that can both locate and unlock the vault, which he does by unscrambling a single clue and shuffling down an air duct.
Based on the Red 5 Comics series by Scott Chitwood and Paul Ens, Afterburn is supremely silly stuff, but there’s enough ridiculous story here to hang a so-bad-it’s-good action movie. There’s just one thing missing: the action. Director Perry’s previous two films were packed with fight scenes, but here there are only three brief hand-to-hand combat sequences and one car vs. tank chase. They’re all proficiently choreographed and edited, but they make up about 10 minutes of this 105-minute feature.
What we’re left with is a scene after scene of plot exposition, character drama, and the hulking Bautista creeping around in silence while pulling off some kind of allegedly complex heist, which the audience is largely left in the dark on. We’re missing any kind of tension or conflict, and Jake doesn’t even meet Hivju’s main villain or the second-in-command (played by Daniel Bernhardt) until five minutes before the end credits.
That makes Afterburn a chore to sit through, and while locals might have some fun spotting the abandoned factories, warehouses, and quarries around Bratislava that fill in for a variety of locations around France, this one is tough to recommend for even die-hard bad movie fans. It does have the kind of 1980s post-apocalyptic aesthetic that became popular in the wake of the original Mad Max films, and largely recreates the feeling of watching a ripoff like Steel Dawn or Cyborg, despite a Hollywood-sized budget.
Afterburn aims high but barely takes off, offering more dull plotting than explosive thrills. Despite a few competent action moments and scenic Bratislava locations, the film’s pacing and thin plot leave it stranded in a dystopian drift. This is Bautista’s second post-apocalyptic film of the summer, following Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands, and second post-apocalyptic heist film, following Zach Snyder’s Army of the Dead. Against all odds, it’s his worst one yet.
