Life After Fighting

 Life After Fighting is a passion/vanity project from Aussie martial artist and stuntman - and now writer/director/star Bren Foster. Like most vanity projects, it's a little clumsy, a little indulgent... but unlike the vast majority of them, it's a magnificent showcase for some truly talented performers to strut their stuff. Eventually. But most of the rest of it is pretty enjoyable, too.

 Foster plays the protagonist Alex Faulkner as one of those invulnerable, almost-perfect sweethearts; even his major trauma/flaw would count as a humble brag for anyone else (he didn't loose his undisputed world champion title, you see - he threw that fight because his heart wasn't in it).

 This sort of thing is usually pretty fucking annoying, but Foster is so damn nice and likeable in the role it's all but impossible to hate this square doofus. Alex runs a dojo, loves kids, tries to stay out of trouble, starts a sweet relationship with the mom of one of the kids (Cassie Howarth) when she asks him out... low-key, relatable stuff, shown at a leisurely pace with lots of footage of him training with his students.

 There is some drama: There's a hungry young martial artist making the rounds trying to get Alex to come out of retirement, his new girlfriend's ex (Luke Ford) is one of those creepily possessive dudes who also tries to start some shit with him, and two strangers show up at his class, beat up his students and insult Alex's martial arts (a classic).

 I'd actually have liked this movie a lot more, I think, if it had stayed a slightly digressive indie drama with a few fights thrown in here and there. But if you've seen the trailer, you know that a child trafficking ring derails everything by kidnapping the children of the dojo's receptionist (Annabelle Stephenson). Jerks!
 To its credit, the film tries to do justice to its grim subject matter by treating everything extremely seriously, so the film becomes first a drama and then a thriller before it can go back to being about people beating the living shit out of each other.

 This approach unfortunately comes with more than a few problems.

 The drama is fine, but staid, and it feels a little like a TV movie; The thriller aspects don't fare as well. The law of narrative economy dictates that the plot tie back to one of the prior conflicts, so the identity of the villains ends up being both unsurprising and uncomfortably contrived. And once our protagonists discover what's going on, their choices start getting pretty... well, dumb. Let's just say that this movie would have been a hell of a lot shorter if Alex had remembered he was carrying a mobile phone.
 And yes, I'm perfectly happy ignoring plot holes or handwaving when a script's trying to move things from fight A to fight B, but here everything's taken seriously enough to bloat the running time to beyond two hours, so I think it's fair to put it to task.

 It's still enjoyable, but the film does sag quite a bit in its middle section, and it gets pretty dark; I'm used to tonal whiplash from Asian films, but I was surprised here at how far Life After Fighting was willing to go with normally taboo subjects. The good news is that once all the chips fall in place, the last forty or so minutes of the movie consist of a prolonged fight pitting Alex against a platoon of very hateable evil assholes. It's just as good as you'd hope it could be.
 Alex faces off against a mostly interchangeable rota of thugs; Of the two exceptions, one is a guy he handily defeated previously, and the other (the 'boss') chooses to keep a balaclava on through the whole fight, denying us the pleasure of hateful stares, shocked expressions and moments of begrudging respect. The fights are complex and very well filmed; The edits mostly consist of long takes, the cameras have a habit of moving along with the action, and everyone displays an admirable Hong-Kong-like willingness to be thrown against the furniture, breaking wood panels, windows, and in a particularly painful-looking move, a glass display case. The choreography (also by Foster) does get a little repetitive at times but it's expertly delivered by everyone involved and it mixes a variety of styles to great effect. I'm no expert, but I counted Tae Kwon Do, Muay Thai/Kickboxing, Krav maga and a whole lot of Jiu Jitsu.

 That last epic battle does a lot to redeem the film; It truly does belong in the canon of great western martial arts fights. Most of the film's problems are self-inflicted by tackling a plot that's a little too dark for a film where a knife does an exaggerated swish! sound every time it swings, and a little too complex for the somewhat clumsy script to deliver on successfully. But all this also kind of makes the whole endeavour endearingly ambitious, and the villains all the more hateful.

 Let's hope Mr. Foster has a few more like these in him, or that it gets him some well deserved recognition, and hopefully a starring role.