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Rating: ★★★½☆ (3.5 / 5)
SPOILER WARNING: This review discusses the plot of Afterburn (2025) in full, including major character fates, betrayals, and the ending. Read on only if you’ve already seen it or don’t mind knowing everything going in.
Buckle Up — Afterburn Goes Full-Throttle
Afterburn throws audiences straight into a scorched, resource-starved future where civilization has splintered into fiercely guarded enclaves, and from the opening stretch it’s clear this is a movie built to detonate, not simmer. The world has literally been burned out by a solar flare, leaving cities gutted, tech fried, and basic necessities rationed out by whoever has enough weapons and nerve to claim them, so anything from the old world that still exists intact is rarer than fuel, food, or bullets. Dave Bautista stars as Jake, a hardened survivor turned fortune hunter who makes his living diving into irradiated ruins and no-go zones to pull out whatever relics still have value, selling them off to whichever warlord or broker can pay the most. That’s how he ends up on the radar of Samuel L. Jackson’s King, a coolly menacing power broker who sits on his own fortified slice of this broken world and sees art, culture, and symbols as just another kind of high-value currency.
King dispatches Jake on the ultimate high-risk, high-reward score: track down and retrieve the Mona Lisa, a painting that has somehow survived when most of human history has been reduced to ash. In a future where people are trading scrap for water, the Mona Lisa isn’t just a museum piece; it’s a myth made real, a priceless bargaining chip that could buy influence, unify factions, or tilt the fragile balance of power between enclaves. The job is suicidal enough that Jake needs backup, which is where Drea comes in — a sharp, capable ally who knows the routes, the dangers, and the people you have to bribe or blast your way past to get anywhere near the target. Their uneasy partnership gives the mission a pulse: he’s the muscle and seasoned scavenger, she’s the quick-thinking operator who refuses to be just another passenger on Jake’s ride into hell.
The deeper they push toward the painting’s last known location, the more it becomes clear they’re not the only ones chasing this relic of the old world. Their hunt puts them on a direct collision course with Volkov (Game of Throne’s Kristofer Hivju) and his forces, a rival power who understands exactly how dangerous it would be for King to own something as symbolically potent as the Mona Lisa. For Volkov, stopping Jake and Drea isn’t just about denying King a trophy; it’s about preventing a seismic shift in who gets to write the story of what survives from before the burn. By the time the mission truly kicks into gear, the stakes are less about whether Jake can survive another run through a death zone and more about which warlord gets to hold the future hostage with a single painting, setting the stage for an escalating, cross-wasteland struggle that keeps tightening the noose around every choice Jake and Drea make.
Director J.J. Perry — a former stuntman turned filmmaker — uses that setup as a launchpad for wall-to-wall physical mayhem. This is your official heads-up: everything below digs into how the mission unfolds, who ends up on which side, and how it all comes crashing to a close, because the back half of this film is where it truly earns its keep.
Dave Bautista Goes Full Beast Mode
As fortune hunter Jake, Bautista doesn’t just show up for this one — he detonates. As the mission drags him deeper into confrontations with old loyalties turned hostile and new threats closing in, he throws his entire physical presence into every brawl, selling bone-rattling impact with a commitment that makes the brutality feel earned rather than staged. Afterburn gives his fights an old-school graphic-violence edge: hard impacts land with ugly force, bloodier practical effects make every collision feel consequential, and the close-quarters exchanges have the bruising immediacy of a classic action picture.
Crucially, the movie also taps into a softer, more vulnerable side of Jake in the downbeats — hushed conversations, shell-shocked pauses, dark humor and small, almost embarrassed gestures of guilt and care that play completely straight and undercut any “invincible tank” vibe without ever deflating his menace. Those restrained, wounded moments become the pressure cooker that makes his sudden spikes of savage, old-school violence feel like controlled detonations rather than random rage, giving the character extra layers without sanding down the sheer intimidation of his physical presence.
What elevates it above pure spectacle is that he never abandons the quieter, weary humanity underneath the muscle; even mid-rampage, you believe this is a man who’s exhausted by the violence he’s forced to inflict. By the time the mission reaches its most dangerous turns, Bautista has fully shifted into beast mode, and the film is smart enough to just get out of his way and let him work.
Olga Kurylenko Cuts Loose
Olga Kurylenko’s Drea doesn’t just back up Bautista’s Jake — she goes full weapons-free and proves she belongs in the same frame as him and is an action star in her own right. As Jake’s on-the-ground partner, she’s constantly in motion, matching his intensity beat for beat and sparking a sharp, wary chemistry that never softens into clichéd romance; they feel like two bruised professionals testing how far they can trust each other while bullets are flying. Stripped of easy firepower in several of the film’s tensest confrontations, she’s forced into hand-to-hand exchanges that put her own physicality and stunt work front and center, and she sells every brutal second of it.
Before the big car chase kicks in, it’s Drea who clears the path: she tears through the room full of mercenaries with crisp throws, vicious disarms, and brutal knife and pistol work that feels like a cornered operative improvising under pressure rather than a sidekick waiting for rescue. Her action has a satisfying martial-arts precision, with sharp weapon transitions and close-quarters gunplay that lean into old-school, graphic impact — bone-crunching punches, messy gun-fu headshots, and nasty, practical blood squibs that keep everything grounded and mean. Even when the choreography turns especially punishing, Drea never reads as a damsel; her sharp intelligence and capability make her a genuine counterpart to Jake in the chaos, and when the mission’s loyalties start fracturing in the back half, it’s her bruising action beats — not just her dialogue — that carry the weight of the betrayals detonating around her.
Daniel Bernhardt’s Gorynych Steals the Show as Volkov’s Deadliest Wildcard
Every time Daniel Bernhardt’s Gorynych drifts into frame, Afterburn tightens like a noose. Volkov’s hulking right-hand man is the kind of silent, coiled threat you never forget is in the room; he lurks at the edges of scenes, posted up behind his boss or just out of focus, radiating menace and making it clear that when things get truly ugly, he’s the one who’ll be turned loose. Perry smartly lets Gorynych simmer for most of the film, using Bernhardt as a constant visual warning that Jake is eventually going to have to go through this guy, and it’s not going to be pretty.
When that moment finally comes near the end and Gorynych is fully unleashed on Bautista’s Jake, the movie shifts into pure martial-arts showcase mode: Bernhardt’s physical presence, sniper-precise timing, and veteran combat skills slam into Bautista’s brute-force style in a long, bruising throwdown that feels like two tanks trading kill shots at knife range. Their showdown pushes the hand-to-hand choreography to its sharpest, most dangerous level, and every exchange plays because Bernhardt can actually sell the velocity, impact, and intent behind each strike. He’s not just a cool mini-boss; he’s the payoff to all that slow-burn intimidation, and a perfect example of how Perry’s practical, stunt-first approach sings when you put it in the hands of real screen fighters.
On the other side of the blast radius is Kristofer Hivju’s Volkov, the film’s primary antagonist, a sneering warlord who lets Hivju chew the scenery and clearly revel in the chaos even as Volkov himself stays a pretty one-note, thoroughly vile baddie. Balancing him out on the margins is Samuel L. Jackson’s King, who doesn’t get much screen time but instantly spikes the energy every time he shows up, squeezing maximum impact from a lean role with that trademark urban gravitas, flinty authority, and an effortless, don’t-mess-with-me presence that the movie leans on whenever it can.
J.J. Perry’s Stunt-Driven Direction
J.J. Perry’s background as an elite martial artist and stunt coordinator is stamped on every frame of Afterburn, and it’s the single biggest reason the film works as well as it does. As someone who’s followed Perry’s work for years, I’m genuinely thrilled to see him leaning into directing after making the jump with Day Shift alongside Jamie Foxx, and I’m excited to watch him keep cranking out cool, stunt-driven action movies. His direction favors clarity and physical authenticity over frantic cutting, letting choreography and environment do the storytelling — you can actually track every hit, every grab, every desperate scramble, and every weapon transition. He embraces an old-school appetite for graphic violence, allowing hard impacts and bloodier practical effects to sell the danger instead of sanding it down, and his gun-fu choreography is as tight and tactile as anything he’s staged from behind the camera.
The close-quarters gunplay is especially strong, folding gun-fu-style movement into martial-arts choreography as characters fire, disarm, pivot, and switch weapons at intimate range. Perry builds whole exchanges around rapid weapon transitions and clean, readable disarms, with shooters sliding from pistols to rifles to scavenged hardware mid-combat, often abandoning spent guns in motion rather than pausing to reload. Point-blank standoffs collapse into rolling brawls where combatants are constantly shooting while moving, using firearms as striking tools for elbows, parries, and jabs between bursts of automatic fire, so punches, grapples, and takedowns feel like an unbroken extension of trigger pulls and muzzle flashes.
Limbs get trapped around barrels, magazines become improvised bludgeons, and bodies are steered into kill zones with the same precision as traditional throws, giving the action a graphic, bone-rattling impact that still reads as old-school, practical-first filmmaking. The post-apocalyptic setting is richly, tangibly realized, full of scavenged tech and sun-bleached ruins that feel lived-in rather than art-directed, but Perry never lets world-building slow the momentum. The story itself is thin, stretched over a fairly familiar survival-thriller skeleton, but Perry’s muscular, practical-first choreography turns that thinness into a feature: the movie knows exactly what it’s good at and sprints toward the next set piece as fast as it can.
The Set Pieces: Brutal Fights, Gunplay, and Chases
This is where Afterburn goes from solid to genuinely electric. Perry leans hard into practical stunt work, and the hand-to-hand brawls have real, bone-crunching weight — Bautista’s confrontations in particular land with a force that digital spectacle simply can’t replicate. The gunplay is tight and tactical rather than showy, forcing characters to scramble for cover and improvise rather than mow through endless faceless enemies, which keeps every exchange feeling dangerous. The vehicular chase sequences are tightly constructed and favor tangible, practical danger — metal crunching, dust kicking up, stakes that feel physical rather than digital. Nothing here feels gratuitous for its own sake; every set piece pushes the fracturing loyalties and mounting betrayals of the mission forward, and the commitment to practical effects gives even familiar genre beats a visceral, full-throttle punch.
Afterburn‘s Three Big Action Set Pieces
Set Piece One: The Violin Job Brawl
The film wastes zero time proving what Bautista’s Jake is capable of. His first real altercation comes early, during a tense retrieval job for a priceless violin tucked away in a heavily guarded enclave, and it’s the moment Afterburn announces exactly what kind of movie it’s going to be. What starts as a quiet infiltration curdles fast into a cramped, brutal scrap once Jake is made, and Perry shoots it with the kind of close-quarters clarity that lets every bone-jarring hit land. Jake improvises with whatever’s in reach — elbows, furniture, a stairwell railing — and the choreography has a nasty, old-school physicality to it: no bullet-time, no over-cut spectacle, just hard impacts and bloodier practical effects that make you wince. This is the scene where Jake stops being a weary treasure hunter and starts being the beast-mode wrecking ball the rest of the movie leans on, and Bautista sells every second of that shift with his body language alone.
Set Piece Two: The Mid-Film Car Chase Goes Full Throttle
If the violin brawl is Afterburn‘s introduction, the mid-film car chase is its statement of intent. This sequence is pure, unapologetic Fast & Furious energy filtered through a scorched post-apocalyptic lens: muscle cars and armored trucks tearing through dust-choked streets, sideswiping wrecks, and launching off crumbling overpasses while Volkov’s mercenaries hang out of windows unloading machine-gun fire. Perry’s stunt pedigree is on full display here — these are tangible, practical vehicle stunts, with real metal crunching and real dust kicking up, not weightless digital spectacle. Explosions bloom in the rearview mirror as fuel tanks get torn open, and the editing stays patient enough that you can actually track who’s shooting at whom and why. It’s loud, it’s relentless, and it’s exactly the kind of extreme, practically-grounded vehicular mayhem that makes the back half of this movie sing.
Set Piece Three: The Train Finale and the Gorynych Showdown
Everything Afterburn has been building toward detonates on the train. Jake carves his way down the length of the cars in a sustained gauntlet against Volkov’s remaining mercenaries, mixing automatic weapons fire with brutal hand-to-hand takedowns as the confined corridors turn every exchange into a desperate, close-range scramble. Perry stages it with the same old-school graphic violence that defines the whole film — hard impacts, messy practical blood effects, and gun-fu-style weapon transitions that never let the momentum sag. Then Gorynych finally steps into the light, and Daniel Bernhardt turns the finale into a full martial-arts showcase, trading knife-range strikes with Bautista in a bruising, sniper-precise duel that feels like two tanks colliding. It’s the film’s most dangerous, most technically sharp fight, and honestly, I wanted both the carnage and Bautista’s fight with Bernhardt to last even longer as what we got was far too short. It’s the perfect capstone to Perry’s practical, stunt-first vision — proof that Afterburn saves its very best for last.
The Negatives
For all of Afterburn’s kinetic confidence, the film’s weaknesses keep it from reaching the next level. The post-apocalyptic plot is thin and often predictable, reducing a potentially rich world of scorched ruins, rival enclaves, and survival politics to a familiar chase for a valuable relic, while the underdeveloped world-building leaves too many factions, histories, and stakes feeling sketched rather than fully lived-in. Volkov’s villainy is largely one-note, and the pacing can lurch between explosive action and exposition that arrives in blunt, clunky bursts.
Jake and Drea’s relationship has real friction, but their character development is rushed, with major emotional turns landing before the screenplay has earned them. Even the dialogue occasionally sounds less convincing than the practical stunts, and some CGI-heavy moments lack the tactile punch of the hand-to-hand fights, gunplay, and vehicle chaos. Those shortcomings matter because Bautista’s total commitment and J.J. Perry’s stunt-driven direction clearly point toward a more substantial action movie; instead, Afterburn remains a bruising, energized ride that earns its 3.5 out of 5, but stops just short of becoming something truly exceptional.
The climactic action is so ferociously staged and sharply edited that I wanted the carnage—and Bautista’s bruising showdown with Bernhardt in particular—to go on even longer. The film doesn’t just earn that appetite for more, it weaponizes it, delivering a finale that hits hard enough to leave you buzzing even as it moves on a beat or two sooner than you’d like.
The Verdict
Afterburn earns an Action-Flix worthy 3.5-star rating by being exactly what it set out to be: a stunt-driven, practically grounded action machine with a thin story wrapped around genuinely thrilling set pieces. Bautista goes full beast mode, Kurylenko finally gets to cut loose and prove her own physical chops, and Daniel Bernhardt’s presence sharpens the hand-to-hand combat into some of the film’s most memorable moments.
The old-school graphic violence is a major part of the appeal: hard impacts, bloodier practical effects, and close-quarters gunplay give the action a tactile punch, while weapon transitions and gun-fu-style martial-arts choreography keep the fights moving with a crisp, physical rhythm. J.J. Perry’s muscular, momentum-first direction keeps the brawls, gunplay, and chases feeling tangible and dangerous even when the plot mechanics creak. It doesn’t reinvent the post-apocalyptic survival thriller, but for anyone craving brutal, practical, full-throttle action with real stakes and real betrayals behind it, Afterburn delivers more than enough to be worth the ride.
Final verdict: Afterburn is a thin but highly watchable post-apocalyptic action machine, elevated by J.J. Perry’s practical stunt direction, kinetic gun-fu, Bautista’s beast-mode physicality, and a gloriously old-school taste for graphic violence. It’s bruising, breathless, and built to leave you grinning through the wreckage — a full-throttle Action-Flix ride that earns its 3.5 out of 5 stars (★★★½☆).
