Afterburn

The Reluctant Archaeologist of the Apocalypse

Somewhere along the way, the end of the world stopped being treated like a catastrophe and turned into a playground. J.J. Perry’s *Afterburn* doesn’t fight that shift for a second. A solar flare wipes out the eastern hemisphere, the electronics die, states collapse, and six years later Europe has become a lawless barter fair policed by men with too many guns. None of that is new. What makes Perry’s version mildly endearing is how little interest he has in pretending it means anything profound. The movie plays less like a warning and more like a hard-R cartoon having a very good time with the wreckage.



Perry came up through stunt work, and you feel that practical instinct in nearly every sequence. He uses the camera like a piece of shop equipment: not precious, just there to catch impact clearly. The movie’s best asset, though, is Dave Bautista. After years of proving he can do far more than stand there looking dangerous, he plays Jake, a salvage diver turned post-apocalypse treasure hunter, with a kind of full-body fatigue I really liked. A lesser performer would just stomp through the ruins like a tank. Bautista slumps. He trudges. He gives Jake the air of a man profoundly tired of having to shoot one more idiot. Early on, he recovers a 17th-century Stradivarius violin and is immediately jumped by scavengers. The little beat where he carefully sets the instrument down, sighs, and only then reaches for the shotgun says everything. He’d rather be anywhere else. Ideally on the boat he keeps trying to afford.



Then Samuel L. Jackson barges in as August Valentine, the self-appointed "King of England," and the movie gets even less interested in behaving. Valentine hires Jake to cross the irradiated Channel into France and steal the Mona Lisa from a vault. Why warlords in these movies always end up wanting European art is anybody’s guess; perhaps mud eventually gets visually boring. The mission mostly exists to throw Jake together with a local resistance fighter played by Olga Kurylenko, who hits a pleasing note of permanently irritated competence, and then shove them onto a tricked-out ATV so Perry can stage long chases with tanks on their heels. That’s where he’s in his element. The action is thick, tangible, and easy to follow. You can tell where bodies are in space and who is hitting whom, which really should not feel rare in 2025. *High On Films* caught the tone well, saying the movie "strips humanity down to pulp, bone, and absurd levels of bloodshed."



Does the whole thing cohere? Not especially. The third act abruptly swerves away from the art-heist angle and into more conventional action nonsense, with Kristofer Hivju showing up as an enjoyably deranged warlord and a secret payload resetting the stakes. The CG gets shaky during the climactic train set piece, and the modest budget starts showing through in a big way. But *Afterburn* is so clearly reaching for that old straight-to-video sweetness that I wound up cutting it some slack. The messiness almost helps. In a genre that usually buries itself under ash, gray skies, and speeches about human depravity, there’s something refreshing about a movie that shrugs and says the apocalypse will probably just become another hustle.