Aftermath has Dylan Sprouse as a returning combat veteran with PTSD who's back home in Massachusetts, where he and his sister (Megan Stott) are driving over the Tobin Bridge into Boston. As luck would have it, a woman (Dichen Lachman) in police custody is being transported across the bridge as well, as she's set to testify against a terrorist group composed of former special forces soldiers, led by Mason Gooding. Gooding and company aren't fans of her doing that, so they blow up half the bridge, blockade the other half, and are essentially holding everyone who was trying to cross at that moment hostage until they can get her. Will our fly-in-the-ointment hero Sprouse be able to take them all down?
This wasn't a bad deal. Sprouse is solid enough as the hero, Gooding is solid enough as the baddie, and there's some good action that gets you to the church on time. With all the other options out there to watch though, is that good enough? Our review will be only the eighth critic review on IMDb, which for a direct-to-Netflix film with a very limited theatrical release is pretty small. Even in the current ecosystem where critic reviews for direct-to-streaming DTV flicks isn't as high as it was five or six years ago, you'd think high teens or low twenties would be the minimum for this, not seven or eight. I think a big reason is the lack of names. Probably the biggest is Dichen Lachman with her run on Severance, but she's not a star and not on the cover, so the film isn't really selling her--and to be fair, they made Dylan Sprouse look like one of Paul Walker's younger brothers on that cover, so they're not even selling the film on him either. That's too bad though, because while this isn't exactly mind-blowing stuff, it's an entertaining pizza and beer movie, and in this world of myriad streaming options that isn't always a given, so if you get it, you should thank your lucky stars and take it and run.
Let's start with Dylan Sprouse as the lead. Usually in a circumstance like this, he's paired with an aging Hollywood star with a bigger name who they maybe got for one day of shooting, is in maybe two locations, and maybe spends 15% of his screentime not sitting, while Sprouse does all the heavy lifting. It was the classic Randall Scandal formula, while Bruce Willis is tied to a chair, any one of Jesse Metcalfe, Chad Michael Murray, Jamie King, or Ashley Greene are out there running around and punching Michael Sirow or whoever. For Sprouse though, that lack of the big name means fewer eyes and critic reviews find their way to his movie, but I also think it allows him the freedom to show us more of what he can do. Like if they had an Alec Baldwin grimacing and barking orders on a headset from a command center every 15-20 minutes, his face on the tin would get more streams, but I think it also would've weighed things down and taken some of the focus off of Sprouse. It's the modern streaming catch-22: the known face on the tin gets more interest, but the need to shoehorn that character in--played by an actor who's just trying to get it over with too--hurts the overall quality of the movie. Hopefully more of us in the review community will cover more of these to get the word out on them. Either way, Sprouse was solid here, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of what he can do in this space.
Ty and I missed that Mason Gooding is Cuba Gooding Jr.'s son, it took Rich at the DTV Digest to tell us. I don't know if that knowledge would've changed how we felt about his character though. Gooding did a great job playing him, but I think the thing older viewers like me are going to have to get used to is the take younger actors like Gooding will bring to roles like the big baddie in an action movie. This isn't the scenery-chewing fest you'd expect by an actor born in the 50s and 60s, or even someone like Chad Michael Murry in Fortress, who was born in 1981, and even though Murray brought a different energy from those older actors, you could still recognize what he was doing. And to that point, I don't know if we've seen anyone from Gooding's age cohort in a role like this, but I think that different energy added a unique element that helped elevate the film. I'm sure the filmmakers could've found a name actor born in the 60s to play this part and have them chew all the scenery, and we probably would've been okay with it, but I liked that they went this route, and it was good to see that Gooding was up to the task.
All that said, Gooding's baddie did one of the worst things I could think of a baddie doing: blowing up the Tobin Bridge. Really, blowing up any bridge that sees a lot of traffic in a major city is a horrible thing to do. Not just the poor people trying to get home who were stuck and held hostage for however many hours, but the millions of people whose commutes will be negatively affected for months. I mean, what selfish bastard could do something so shitty? And the thing is, in American cities, public transit infrastructure has been so diminished that there's no way it could handle the added stress of so many more people using the system. Maybe that's the whole point of the movie though, to remind us that America has pivoted over the last 75 years or so to the least efficient mode of people movement, the car, at the detriment to the most efficient, high-speed rail, and while the idea of a terrorist group blowing up a bridge like this is an extreme example, our crumbling infrastructure means more bridges will be falling out of commission, and the fact that we've diminished our public transit systems to such a degree that driving is the only option for most Americans, these kinds of infrastructure concerns will be that much more burdensome, leading to billions of dollars in lost revenue, something we could prevent by spending a fraction of that to invest in better transit systems. So as much as the baddie is a jerk for doing this, I think the movie's message that we're too car dependent, even in a city like Boston that has a robust transit system by American standards, is a good one.
Finally, you're probably thinking "wasn't that the 'finally' paragraph?", which in many cases it would be, but I wanted to mention that Tanner Zagarino has a small part as one of Gooding's henchman. Yes, he's the son of DTVC Hall of Famer Frank Zagarino. The part is small, Sprouse takes him out early, then steals his mask to infiltrate the rest of the baddies. I looked at his IMDb bio, and the only other things he did of note are Pool Boy Nightmare, a Lifetime movie costarring Jessica Norris (of Santa's Summer House fame), which Jay Harangue did his magic on on his YouTube channel; and The Price We Pay, a heist thriller with Stephen Dorf and Emil Hirsch that, based on the IMDb description, is probably too much for me, but the guys at DTV Digest covered in episode 250 of their show. Anyway, none of that is what we at the DTVC want though, we need Airboss V with Tanner taking over his father's role, or hell, maybe a Project Shadowchaser reboot! Could we get Bryan Genesse's son to co-star? I think you're pickin' up what I'm puttin' down, aren'cha?
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Netflix, and it's available no matter your pricing tier. If you're looking for a 90-minute actioner to get you to the church on time, this will do it. Also check out the podcast episode Ty and I did on this one, 214 in the archives.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26545708
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