Three Films Make A Post: No man left behind.

Life After Fighting (2024): Lead actor/martial artist/director/producer Bren Foster’s directorial debut climaxes in forty minutes or so of incredibly impressive martial arts madness of the naturalistic, bone-crunching style, presented in a direct and visceral way. To get there, you have to work your way through eighty minutes or so of much too slow build-up, pointless side-plots, and scenes that – in classic indie tradition - never seem to want to end when they really should have ended minutes ago.

I do appreciate Foster’s willingness to go slow and actually ground his character emotionally – this certainly beats the “egomaniac martial arts asshole” you always fear in this kind of project – but there’s providing the ground for things, and then there’s scenes crawling by at a snail’s pace for no good reason.

The Heroin Busters aka La via della droga (1977): This Enzo G. Castellari joint with Fabio Testi (playing a character named Fabio in case he forgets) and David Hemmings as cops (well, Hemmings is playing an Interpol agent) on a rampage starts out pretty slow as well, but it doesn’t take more than half of its running time to gather its speed. Once it dies get going, there’s no holding its series of probably highly dangerous to stunt people action sequences back for even a second. There’s a manic, dangerous energy to Castellari’s action at its best, and here, he holds that level for the whole last act of the film, while doing much less feet-dragging than Foster’s movie before.

Land of Bad (2024): Despite the military-based version of the action film being my least favourite type – I dislike some of the sub-genre’s inherent assumptions even less so than those of vigilante films – it is difficult to find fault with the way William Eubank and a game bunch of actors (several Hemsworths, Ricky Whittle and Milo Ventimiglia in an actually good performance, as well Russell Crowe chewing scenery delightfully as the Man in the Chair) present a series of theoretically tired old clichés. In a style I find by now typical of Eubank, he leaves no cent of the budget not visible on screen, so there’s an always entertaining series of gunplay, explosions, unarmed combat and more explosions shown off in the most effective manner possible.

The character bits are clichéd but also just work, so there’s enough emotional backing to the violence. If you squint and look at the film in the right light, you might also see it as a mild critique of the detached ways of modern technological warfare in some scenes, of course in between the film milking modern technological warfare for the funnest possible action.