Life After Fighting (2024) Review

“Life After Fighting” Theatrical Poster

Director: Bren Foster
Cast: Bren Foster, Cassie Howarth, Annabelle Stephenson, Luke Ford, Eddie Arrazola, Ethan Browne, Ruby Busuttil, Denise Chan, Mike Duncan, Hakan Manav
Running Time: 125 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Let’s face it, Australia isn’t going to be the first country anyone thinks of when it comes to martial arts movies. Sure productions have been filmed there (Jackie Chan even has his own Australia trilogy thanks to First Strike, Mr. Nice Guy, and Bleeding Steel), we’ve had mythical kung-fu kangaroos in Ronny Yu’s Warriors of Virtue, and Australian director Brian Trenchard-Smith was famously responsible for unleashing Jimmy Wang Yu on down under shores in The Man from Hong Kong. However in terms of a true Australian production with a cast and crew of local talent, you have to go back to the era of Edward John Stazak playing Jason Blade in 1988’s Day of the Panther and Strike of the Panther double bill. So it’s long overdue that in 2024, Australian martial artist Bren Foster has stepped up to the table to star, direct, write, produce, and choreograph Life After Fighting.

While Foster’s name may not be immediately recognizable, largely thanks to a filmography that’s utilised his acting talent more than his propensity for martial arts, he has been given opportunities to let loose before. I’d be willing to bet anyone who saw the early 2010’s Keoni Waxman movies Maximum Conviction and Force of Execution would have walked away asking who Bren Foster was and what needed to be done to have him headline his own movie. 10 years on Life After Fighting offers the answer. After spending several years based in the States Foster has spent the last few settled down back in Australia, and has decided to take matters into his own hands. The good news is fans of martial arts cinema will definitely be glad he did.

Playing a retired competitive fighter who now runs a mixed martial arts school, Foster’s life becomes complicated when he gets involved romantically with the single mother of one of the kids he teaches. With a clingy ex-husband who has ties with a Romanian child trafficking ring, when a pair of students are abducted from outside the school and go missing, Foster eventually finds himself forced into action so that they can be saved before being shipped off. So far, so Taken, however Life After Fighting aims to take a more realistic and grounded approach to the events that play out, with Foster leaving it to the police to conduct their investigation, while his character attempts to continue running the school during the day to day.

At 125 minutes, the approach serves to highlight some of the expected pitfalls of a first-time director. Foster has stated he wanted to authentically capture what it’s like to run a martial arts school, and to that end he’s successful, however the issue is that running a martial arts school is not really what Life After Fighting is about. At its core is an action thriller about an ex-fighter turned martial arts instructor tracking down the degenerates who have abducted a pair of kids, and the expected confrontations that follow. However during the first 2 thirds of Life After Fighting we spend a little too much time watching scenes of Foster with his students in the school, and the biggest issue is that they don’t really tell the audience anything we don’t already know from the school set scenes that play over the opening credits. Without the scenes acting as character development or to advance the plot, they inevitably begin to feel like padding.

Similarly for Luke Ford (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Ghost Machine), who plays the ex-husband with such villainous relish that it becomes impossible to imagine how he ever convinced anyone he was loving husband material, let alone fathered a child together (although I’m glad he did, since one specific scene between him and his son is a brutal standout). It’s worth noting that the fact Ford is behind the child trafficking ring is portrayed as a big reveal, however it’s so obvious he’s involved from the moment the kids get abducted that it’s really a non-spoiler. Thankfully Foster himself serves as an effective anchor, graced with a rugged screen presence and understated charisma, his self-penned script expectedly plays to his strengths as a performer the most.

The main reason anyone will be clocking into Life After Fighting though will of course be for the action, and if the dramatic aspects feel a little pedestrian in their execution, then the direction of the action feels like the polar opposite. Foster sprinkles in a handful of fights throughout the runtime, the first one that really shows what he can do being a one on one against martial artist Hakan Manav (here making his feature length debut) who gate crashes one of his classes, and another standout has him go toe to toe with his The Last Ship co-star Eddie Arrazola. I’m glad the latter fight is in there as it acts as a kind of primer for the finale, although the context it takes place in is completely superfluous, with Arrazola playing a champion who wanted to fight Foster before his early retirement and hasn’t been able to let it go.

In many ways it feels like a homage to old-school kung-fu cinema (how many times have we seen a young upstart want to challenge a retired master?), but at the same time sticks out like a sore thumb in the way it has nothing to do with the actual plot. Thankfully the finale pits Foster as a one-man army against 9 mercenaries that Ford has hired within the confines of the school, and the final reel of Life After Fighting serves up a masterclass of martial arts brutality that makes it possible to overlook any shortcomings in other areas of the production. It’s the kind of relentless onslaught that delivers an intensity on the same level as the finale of Ong Bak 2 or the hallway fight in The Raid (which Foster has openly stated was an influence – look out for a kill that pays homage to both a moment in The Raid and The Raid 2 at the same time), and is an absolute joy to watch.

What makes the sequence so unique is that Foster has chosen to eschew the action movie trope of ‘once a guy is knocked out, they stay knocked out’, so that every time someone is smashed through a window or has their head put through a wall, a few minutes later they regain consciousness and go at it again. From a cinematic perspective it offers up a streak of black humour at the fact Foster exhausts himself needing to fight the same opponent’s multiple times, but it also works on a narrative level, since it serves to make him realise that the only way to stop them is to kill them. The result is that the fights become gradually more violent the more they continue, offering up a perfect example of storytelling through choreography, and I challenge anyone to not feel their own adrenaline pumping during the sequence.

Foster himself incorporates all of the styles he’s proficient in, and without creating a laundry list of every style that gets thrown into the mix, even an untrained eye will likely be able to spot Taekwondo, Hapkido, Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu, and Escirima (and for anyone who watched Foster interviewed by Scott Adkins on the latter’s The Art of Action series – yes – the move that involves ripping someone’s throat out is included). The real joy though lies in watching each of the styles be blended together so seamlessly (and ruthlessly!), ensuring that the finale of Life After Fighting deserves to be included in any discussion on the best moments in 21^st century martial arts cinema.

As a whole Life of Fighting could easily have benefitted from having 20 minutes shaved off the runtime to make it a little leaner, with Foster’s ambition to capture what it means to be a martial arts teacher sometimes feeling like it gets in the way of the main narrative thrust rather than complimenting it. However the reward at the end is a significant one, and no doubt is all the more powerful because of the stakes that have been established prior, so some of the lesser moments are easily forgivable. It’s probably still too early to tell if Life After Fighting will put Australia on the map for martial arts movies, but if it does, it would undoubtably be well deserved.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7/10