‘Life after Fighting’ Review

There’s something wholly endearing about watching a low-budget action film where you can see the passion imbued in every frame, even if the filmmaking itself can sometimes falter. Recent titles like Hydra and The Paper Tigers come to mind as earnest attempts to bring something exciting to the screen with minimal resources. It’s in the ability to craft something around exciting action sequences where low-budget films tend to flail or put as many cliches and shortcuts in their screenplay as possible to get to the meat of the experience. Bren Foster’s directorial debut, Life After Fighting, does not dodge some of these pitfalls but instead weaves them into its advantage and crafts a grim and tense first two acts that build towards one of the most pummeling action sequences of the year. With a final act that leaves nothing on the table, Life After Fighting is a remarkably intense and exhilarating action vehicle that does a lot with very little in its arsenal.

Foster not only stars in and directs but also writes, produces, and is the stunt coordinator for what is ostensibly a vanity project built around Foster’s abilities as a performer. Life After Fighting is centered around Alex Faulkner (Foster), a retired martial arts champion who quit at his peak and retreated into some semblance of a normal life by opening his own Taekwondo gym (of which Foster holds a black belt, as well as multiple other martial arts disciplines). After falling in love with Samantha (Cassie Howarth), he quickly becomes the subject of ire from her ex-husband, Victor (Luke Ford). The screenplay punches its melodrama up with a few fisticuffs throughout as menacing men enter Alex’s place of business and threaten the tranquility he has created for himself, but what is most interesting about the first half of Life After Fighting is that it does a decent job at fleshing out its network of characters while always digging at Alex’s past and his mental well-being after choosing to retire. There’s a life lived and a life lost, but as ruminative as Foster’s screenplay can be, it’s never cloying or pushing too much against the forward momentum that its narrative is building towards.

There is the uphill battle of not making the film feel like a puff piece, but there’s only so much that can be done when the narrative is tackling a heavy subject such as child trafficking, where the villains are so villainous that it’s impossible to let the protagonist seem like they might actually lose. If anything, that commitment to the darkness of its plot is the one element holding back Foster’s screenplay once it transitions into its bloody and unrelenting final act. There’s barely room to breathe as the film ratchets up the tension and contorts itself to bring everything rushing forward in a blistering barrage of bruised knuckles and broken bones. Whatever work has been done up to that point in order to make the stakes matter to the audience, it will have to be enough because, at a certain point, the script hits a point of no return. The fortunate element is that every bit of shorthand for getting the audience on Alex’s side and managing to keep the film’s budget from ballooning by keeping its setpieces at a minimum pays off handsomely.

Life After Fighting crescendos over its nastier elements (see: child trafficking, kidnapping, and other very bad things that happen to children in this film) into a confident, unwavering slice of mayhem. Its physical scale is small, as the fight takes place in a single location, but its beats are flashy and fresh. Watching Foster tear his way through henchman after henchman brings the kind of euphoric bliss that often accompanies Ma Dong-seok’s particular brand of violence. In fact, with the way Life After Fighting feels so tailored to its star’s abilities as a martial artist and less to giving him something meaty to sink his teeth into, Foster’s film feels manufactured in the way that Ma’s The Roundup films seem structured around the cinematic beauty of seeing someone decimated by a fist. Foster, however, does not exemplify the same charisma as Ma or other direct-to-video contemporaries in his field, like Scott Adkins or Michael Jai White. There’s a tinge of something potentially there, but most of the work is done on fleshing out his character rather than making him exciting. He’s just very good at knocking out bad guys, and it’s a wonder to behold.

There’s a kinetic quality to every action scene in the film that lends itself to its multi-disciplined star. Every fight moves at a blindingly fast pace without being cut to shreds. Fights have a similar energy to Kensuke Sonomura’s Hydra, in which moments where a character might get a chance to rest for a second are often cut short, and every part of the human body that can be bent into submission is done so in a violent interpretation of Murphy’s Law: anything that can be broken, will be broken. Heavy amounts of grappling obfuscate who is “winning” any fight, and by the end of each skirmish, there’s so much cheap wood broken throughout the scene that it would be amazing if no one got a single splinter. The camerawork is dynamic within each bout, distancing itself when characters are trying to do so and moving in close when the tide of the battle seems to be changing - which, despite Alex seeming invincible, does manage to come through more often than not.

With a wealth of action cinema in recent years that has pushed stunt teams to the forefront and emphasized why a carefully crafted setpiece can be enough to draw in an audience, action junkies sometimes can be left disappointed with the framing used to get to the carnage. That’s what is most impressive about Life After Fighting - it puts work into its characters to make up for its shortcomings. Despite coming in at a longer-than-expected 126 minutes, Foster seems dedicated to pushing the audience into understanding how someone as disciplined as Alex can become the violent angel of vengeance that he does by the end of the film. Action fans can rest assured that while this is definitely a bit of a vanity project that runs into some cliched territory, it’s also a vicious powerhouse of martial arts mayhem that convinces its audience that violence is the only answer.