Animation speed and animation event timing oddities.

Hi all. I've got an animation of my character swinging a hammer. And at a certain point in the animation, i've placed an animation event which triggers a function. this function does all the required stuff for enabling the character to attack again. Basically i want the attack to end before the actual animation does, and for the latter part of the animation to be an optional winding down period that can be interrupted.

Anyways, here's my animation playing in the import preview window. Speed 1.0, created with a 60 fps playback speed in mind

I'm aware the hips look strange. anyways you'll notice the animation event in the timeline. Here's a still shot of exactly where that animation event is in the animation

As can be seen, he's swung the hammer clean across his body when the function is triggered, everything after this is just (relatively) slowly returning to the starting position. This is what i want

Here's how it actually looks in practise when put into my animator:

It might be hard to discern from the low gif framerate, but i think you can see that the full motion is not completing. It stops some way short of where the animation event should be, resulting in an incomplete range of motion

Now taking suggestions on what might be the cause