My quick rating - 4.9/10. Set in a scorched future where the Eastern Hemisphere has been fried to a crisp by a solar flare, Afterburn imagines a postapocalyptic Earth where radiation, fallout, and desperation have turned survival into a scavenger sport. Society may have collapsed, but apparently art history still has some die-hard collectors, because the plot follows treasure hunters tasked with recovering artifacts like the Mona Lisa, the Rosetta Stone, and the Crown Jewels. Civilization is gone, but Sotheby’s is still spiritually alive.
The film kicks off with Dave Bautista’s gravelly narration laying out the state of the world and his role in it. Bautista plays Jake, a rugged artifact retriever hired by King August—played by Samuel L. Jackson, whose casting probably did more heavy lifting than the script itself. Jackson doesn’t get a ton to do, but he brings just enough regal swagger to make “King August” feel less like a video game NPC and more like an actual post-collapse power player.
Jake teams up with Drea, played by Olga Kurylenko, who action fans likely just watched in Thunderbolts*—maybe the producers are counting on that familiarity to fill in whatever the screenplay didn’t. Their mission is to reclaim the Mona Lisa, but of course, rival hunters, mutants, and opportunistic pirates are waiting in the wings to complicate things. The setup plays like a mash-up of Mad Max, Indiana Jones and a Syfy original, just with a slightly better wardrobe budget.
One of the early surprises is an old-school chase scene that actually uses real vehicles. For a moment, you think you’ve stumbled into a 1990s throwback, and then the CGI explosions show up to remind you that post-production can still ruin practical ambition. Tanks fire, debris flies, and it’s fun enough, but the fake blasts are obvious from space. Maybe the same solar flare that nuked the planet took out the effects department, too.
Filmed in Slovakia, the landscapes do a lot of visual heavy lifting. The movie sells its apocalyptic decay fairly well, even if the overall tone gives off strong STS “straight-to-streaming” energy despite its limited theatrical run. The production design screams “budget-conscious bleakness,” but it works.
There’s an ultra-violent gunfight later in the film that actually jolts the movie to life. It’s slick, brutal and stylish—so of course it lasts only a few minutes and never really returns. Had the rest of the action matched that energy, we’d be talking about a very different film.
As expected, there’s a double cross, because what is a treasure-hunting movie without one? The script tries to sprinkle in morality and reflection after that twist, but with four writers credited, you’d think at least one of them could’ve punched up the dialogue or added something less predictable. The chemistry between Bautista and Kurylenko works well enough, and the cast in general keeps this thing from collapsing into total mediocrity.
Without this lineup, Afterburn would have burned out on reentry. The action is serviceable until overproduced effects intrude, the world-building is fine but familiar, and the story unfolds exactly the way I assumed it would within the first ten minutes. It’s popcorn-worthy the first time, but you’ll never feel the need to revisit it or rescue it from any wasteland vault.
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