A lone combat vet squares off against bloody-minded veterans-turned-contractors on a bridge in Boston in “Aftermath,” a sometimes satisfying action pic undone by lapses in logic, talk-you-to-death villains and murky, uneasy politics.
Dylan Sprouse, who got his big breaks as Adam Sandler’s kid in “Big Daddy” and on TV’s “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” plays an ex-Army Ranger whose drive to the movies with his kid sister (Megan Stott of “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Yes Day”) is interrupted by a terrorist attack.
The assault on Boston’s Tobin Bridge is carried out with military precision and uncertain aims. A gang of commandos given “Kilo, Foxtrot, Tango, Sierra, Yankee, Echo” code-names by their leader, “Romeo” (nepo baby Mason Gooding of “Scream”) block traffic and blow two spans of the bridge out.
Their goal? Get to a convict (Dichen Lochman of “Severance”) being transported to a trial.
With a number of people already killed and some 70 or so ziptied to their car steering wheels as hostages, the ex-military/now-“contractors” terrorists have demands, and a live stream platform on which to broadcast them to the world.
Only Eric and his “particular skills” stands in their way. Well, there’s always an older truck-driving vet (Will Lyman) who can be relied on in a pinch. Everybody else is just cowardly “collateral damage.”
And then there’s Eric’s PTSD flashbacks to something that happened in Afghanistan that have to be dealt with.
The set-up is “Die Hard” meets “The Rock,” a plot that’s bloody-minded with military men and women who have gone fascist driving the action.
Eric will pick off the masked murderers, one by one. He’ll drop the occasional one-liner about how he’s acquired a bad guy’s semi-automatic weapon.
“I didn’t get this by playing rock, paper scissors!”
Gooding chews up the scenery as a Man with a Mission, the pill-and-eye-popping commander they used to call “Captain Chaos” starting “the greatest revolution since 1776,” spitting with rage, hectoring the cops and only really challenged by his combat-vet quarry and the convict who remembers him, who betrayed him, the woman they nicknamed “Doc” Brown (Lochman).
Cute.
The picture wanders off the straight and narrow when it pauses to pontificate. The combat situation problem solving is interesting enough, even when far more logical moves make themselves known.
But whatever the effects and convincing (faked) Tobin Bridge setting, the object of the Nathan Graham Davis screenplay is to keep the hero and the villain alive and maybe a wild card character and a sidekick around for a big finale. Director Patrick Lussier — “Drive Angry” was his high-water mark — never forgets that, and more’s the pity.
Rating: unrated, very violent
Cast: Dylan Sprouse, Mason Gooding, Dichen Lochman and Megan Stott.
Credits: Directed by Patrick Lussier, scripted by Nathan Graham Davis. A Voltage release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:37
