AFTERBURN: The Dave Bautista x Mona Lisa Cinematic Universe Continues

Dave Bautista is a fascinating actor. As a professional wrestler-turned-film actor, he could have been the lead in a hundred schlocky action titles and coasted by with the odd ironic turn or two, copying the formula his contemporaries John Cena and Dwayne Johnson rode to success. Instead, Bautista has largely resisted being characterized as an action hero (though he does take the occasional role of a badass macho man with a gun). Bautista has deliberately chosen to pursue a more humble career as a character actor, appearing in a lot of interesting, diverse films, including Blade Runner 2049, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and Knock at the Cabin. But you don’t get to see a great performer tested until you see them in a bad movie.

Afterburn is not a particularly memorable piece of art. But it is, however, a great deal better than it has any right to be. The film is a post-apocalyptic yarn that takes place after most of civilization was destroyed by a solar flare. In the wreckage of London, Bautista plays Jake, a man who loves fine art and vinyl records, dreams of repairing and sailing his boat off into the sunset, and doesn’t seem to have a last name. Jake is a treasure hunter for hire, and his tanky build and skills with a shotgun make him especially sought-after in this world gone to ruin. It’s a comfortable albeit violent life. But one day, he’s recruited by the new king, August Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), to head to France and recover the Mona Lisa.

Afterburn contains more plot than you probably expect from a title like this, though it feels like it only has half as much story as it needs. What’s there is fairly formulaic. Olga Kurylenko plays a French freedom fighter Jake befriends. Kristofer Hivju plays the barbaric villain General Volkov, who loves playing chess and murdering his henchmen when they make the slightest errors. There’s a car chase, a few tense escapes, and a final action set piece on a speeding train. This project, an adaptation of a successful graphic novel, has been in development since the early 2000s, first with Antoine Fuqua attached as director, then The Villainess filmmaker Jung Byung-gil with Gerard Butler as the burly treasure hunter. Those hypothetical versions of this film — including one where Nicolas Cage was attached to star — would probably have been better overall, but the one thing that Afterburn has that those don’t is Dave Bautista, the secret sauce to making this all work.

Dave Bautista Finds the Soul in a Tough Character

Bautista is far and away the most compelling part of the film. Despite the rote story and the unimaginative narrative developments — ooh, cannibals in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I can’t wait to see that for the millionth time — Bautista remains fascinating throughout, not because the character is particularly well-written, but because the actor makes a variety of small choices that add up to a fully defined portrait of a human being.

Bautista plays Jake as a gentle giant and an aesthete, the kind of guy who, if the world hadn’t gone to hell, would be a vinyl store clerk or host a moderately successful movie podcast. Juxtaposing his character’s tough build, there are several moments where Jake reveals that he’s not nearly as experienced as we might expect. When he’s in a plane that’s going to crash, he nervously confesses to the pilot that he’s never had to use a parachute before and doesn’t really know how they work. These moments expose chinks in the character’s hypermasculine veneer, suggesting that Jake is a person whom this rugged post-apocalyptic world does not allow to be open, complex, or vulnerable. Born to love, forced to kill.

I suspect that Bautista brought most of this depth to the character himself. For one thing, he’s written as an ex-soldier, not a humble vinyl record collector who’s been pushed into a violent profession. You can also see evidence of Bautista’s work in the other actors — Kurylenko, Jackson, and Hivju mostly seem like they’re on autopilot here, with Kurylenko and Hivju in particular struggling to add more than a gruff line delivery or two to their otherwise wooden characters. Bautista, on the other hand, feels like he’s performing in a movie that only he can envision, a much better, character-focused action film along the lines of Die Hard or Indiana Jones. He’s sensational, demonstrating an ability to forge a rich inner life for even the most archetypal of characters.

Director J.J. Perry Has the Sauce

I would be remiss not to shout out the work of the film’s director, J.J. Perry, which also goes a long way to elevating Afterburn above my somewhat muted expectations. I watch a lot of this grade of silly direct-to-streaming or direct-to-video stuff, and it usually feels like rushed, cobbled-together, barely comprehensible storytelling that exists to string together a bunch of unrelated action scenes. But Afterburn is assembled with a little more care than most.

Perry, who started his career as a stuntman, actor, and stunt coordinator on B-grade action films like xXx: State of the Union, Homefront, and Olympus Has Fallen, transitioned into directing with Day Shift in 2022, a smart little vampire-hunter action film with Jamie Foxx in the lead role. I quite like Day Shift — I would struggle to say much of substance about it, but it is one of the rare modern action films made by somebody who cares about the characters as much as the fight scenes.

Afterburn is Perry’s third project and his second with Bautista, after the 2024 film The Killer’s Game. As much as I love Bautista’s performance in this film, Perry’s direction very nearly keeps up with him. He’s still a filmmaker who sometimes gets the balance of action and character wrong, but Afterburn contains traces of a much more enterprising and creative storyteller, one who draws inspiration from the pulpy, gritty crime films of the 1970s and ’80s.

There’s a lot of John Carpenter in Afterburn, beneath the digital sheen and silly script. The premise alone invites comparisons to Carpenter’s Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., which the film is all too happy to indulge with cheesy shots of characters walking away from explosions, a sequence where a bunch of cannibals whoop and holler as they leap across a desolate car park, and Dave Bautista’s character, the somewhat reluctant taciturn badass conscripted into a conflict far larger than himself.

There’s some Raiders of the Lost Ark here, too, if only in the throwback map transitions. The action direction doesn’t even come close to Spielberg. But perhaps if the script were better and this had been made for less money — it’s the cheapest-looking $60 million movie I’ve ever seen — this could have been something truly special.

Conclusion

The low-budget action space is one of the few frontiers left for creative filmmakers to experiment while still having a good shot at making their money back. Afterburn might be extremely basic — as far as these go, anyway — but the filmmaking beneath the hood shows a lot of ambition and promise, and Dave Bautista handily proves that no matter the role, he always brings his A game.

Perry has a lot of talent, too — one day, he’ll get a great script and hit a homerun with it. In the meantime, we have Afterburn — a film that’s a helluva lot better than it might’ve been with a  different director or a different star. As a companion piece to Glass Onion (Bautista’s other film about the Mona Lisa), it’s a pretty weird double-bill. Now all Bautista has to do is star in a Leonardo da Vinci biopic or something to complete the trilogy.

Afterburn is now streaming on MGM+ and available to rent online.