September 19, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by J.J. Perry
Culture Representation: Taking place in an undetermined period of time in England and in France, the action film “Afterburn” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Asian people and one African American) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: After an apocalypse that has left the world controlled by fascists in Europe, a treasure hunter is recruited to find the Mona Lisa, and he encounters many villains along the way.
Culture Audience: “Afterburn” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and stale action movies that don’t do anything creative.
“Afterburn” is a generic and terribly made action movie about a treasure hunter looking for the Mona Lisa in a post-apocalyptic world. This mindless flick (which has lackluster acting and mostly forgettable scenes) looks like a filmmaker tax write-off. A surprise plot twist in the movie doesn’t make the story any better because it’s just an example of lazy screenwriting.
Directed by J.J. Perry, “Afterburn” was written by Nimród Antal and Matt Johnson. The movie takes place in an unnamed time period in England and in France, after an apocalypse has devastated Earth. (“Afterburn” was actually filmed in Slovakia.)
In the beginning of the movie, protagonist Jake (played by Dave Bautista), an American bachelor with no children, says in a voiceover that he’s a treasure hunter who works mostly underwater. He brags that he’s skilled at finding “anyone” and “anything.” Jake says that before the apocalypse, he had a comfortable life where he worked independently.
The apocalypse is described as a “solar flare” that caused all electricity and electronic devices to stop working. Warlords seized various governments and are controlling large parts of Europe. It’s implied that this fascist rule also has power over the rest of the world.
Six years after the apocalypse, Jake is living in London. He says, “I resumed finding things, but the world is a much more dangerous place.” Jake is now less of a treasure hunter and more of a scavenger, who goes to abandoned houses to find valuables to sell.
Jake is shown in an abandoned house that apparently used to be occupied by wealthy people. He fights off a group of six or seven goons who are disguised in police uniforms. It’s the first of many unrealistic scenes where Jake is single-handedly able to take on several armed and dangerous opponents and win without any serious wounds.
It turns out that Jake was at this house for a reason: He was sent there by someone calling himself King (played by Samuel L. Jackson) to find a particular Stradivarius violin. Jake retrieves the violin and goes to a palace to deliver the violin to a woman named Fuentes (played by Eden Epstein), King’s chief assistant, who wears a fedora and dresses like she’s in a 1940s spy movie.
Fuentes tells Jake that King has a new assignment for him: Go to France and steal the famous Mona Lisa painting. Jake doesn’t want to do it. Jake says all he wants to do is work on his beloved sailboat, where Jake can do what he wants and tune out the troubles of the world with his pet dog, whose name is Smoke.
Who is King? His real name is August, an American crime lord who’s the self-appointed leader of the United Kingdom and who insists that everyone call him King. Apparently, King is in a power struggle with a military general named Volkov (played by Kristofer Hivju), who has an army of fighters in continental Europe.
King describes Volkov as an “agent of chaos” and explains to Jake that during the apocalypse, the French government was able to secretly hide all of France’s most important national treasures, including the Mona Lisa. (The Louvre Museum in Paris has famously been the home of the Mona Lisa.) King wants the Mona Lisa to use as leverage in the ongoing feud that he has with Volkov.
Jake doesn’t want to go across the English Channel to France for other reasons. Jack makes this comment to Fuentes and King about continental Europe: “There’s nothing there but warlords, diseases and EDM [electronic dance music].” It’s the movie’s attempt at comedy, but most of the jokes in “Afterburn” fall very flat. The movie’s cringeworthy dialogue is laughable for the wrong reasons.
King tells Fuentes that he will make an offer to Jake that Jake can’t refuse. Jake is summoned back to King’s palace, where King tells him that if Jake can get the Mona Lisa for King, then King will give a lot of power to Jake. King says that Jake can have the title of “motherfucker of cultural appropriation.”
There would be no “Afterburn” movie if Jake didn’t go on this mission. And so, Jake goes to France (he leaves his dog Smoke in London to be temporarily looked after by Fuentes) and experiences the usual fights and chases that happen in low-quality action films such as “Afterburn.” Along the way, Jake teams up with a warrior stranger named Drea (played by Olga Kurylenko), who becomes Jake’s ally during the battles with Volkov and his thugs. Drea is a formulaic female sidekick in derivative action movie.
Vokov has a subordinate named Gorynych (played by Daniel Bernhardt), who does a lot of Volkov’s dirty work on the front lines of battle. During this mission, Jake and Drea get help from an unnamed airplane pilot (played George Sommer) and a priest named Father Samson (played by Kevin Eldon), who gives a dune buggy truck to Jake and Drea. Father Samsom just happens to have this truck ready to go at his abandoned church. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.
The costume design for “Afterburn” is all over the place, much like the movie’s disjointed narrative and direction. Jake and Drea dress like they have rejected costumes from “Mad Max” movies. King has a fur-lined coat and hat that look like what Eddie Murphy’s royal character wore in 1998’s “Coming to America.” The airplane pilot dresses like a 1940s combat pilot. (His rickety plane also looks like combat aircraft from the 1940s.) Korlov wears a Nazi-inspired military commandant uniform.
Even though Jackson shares top billing in “Afterburn,” his screen time in the movie is less than 15 minutes. Jackson and the rest of the principal cast members just go through the motions in this “only doing it for the money” garbage film. Bautista and Kurylenko, whose Jake and Drea characters are obvious eventual love interests for each other, don’t have convincing chemistry with each other. The movie’s villains are sterotypical snarling caricatures.
In addition to having a dull story full of plot holes, “Afterburn” suffers from creatively bankrupt direction and plodding pacing. The movie’s plot twist is utterly stupid. And the ending of “Afterburn” is idiotic schmaltz. A short mid-credits scene doesn’t add anything meaningful to this limp story. The only thing that feels authentic about “Afterburn” is the movie’s prophetic title, because viewers will feel the burn of regret after watching this time-wasting junk.
Endurance Media released “Afterburn” in U.S. cinemas on September 19, 2025.
