In the grand tradition of martial arts movies, a man running a taekwondo school attracts negative attention from thugs who happen to be skilled fighters in Bren Foster ‘s Life After Fighting . Alex Faulkner ( Foster ) runs an implausibly huge martial arts school in Sydney, when Sam (Cassie Howarth) brings her son to enlist and takes a shine to Alex. When her ex-husband Victor ( Luke Ford ) takes umbrage, he sets about making life miserable for Alex, culminating in a kidnapping that, wouldn’t you know it, Alex is uniquely equipped to resolve.
Life After Fighting is mostly—and I do mean mostly—a very slow-paced and inexpertly made drama that you know is heading towards a great big punch-up. In this case, that punch-up is so spectacular that it almost entirely makes up for the rest of the film. Lurking somewhere in the film’s two hours is about eighty minutes of solid entertainment, but as it is, you’re going to be sitting through some fairly tedious setup to get to those fights.
Foster and the rest of the stuntmen put on a show that is so brutally fast and creative that it’s honestly hard to figure out how the credits weren’t just a series of memorial dedications. Punches and kicks seem to genuinely connect at full force and bodies slam into walls, floors and furniture with worrying plausibility. To give a little credit to the rest of the film, it does set up the villains as so virulently loathsome that it makes the violence against them more satisfying.
Violenc.