Extraction Has Exceptionally Impressive Action but Not Much Else

Extraction is one of those films where the action comes first and the story comes second. I’m not opposed to things like that; I love my John Wick and Mission: Impossible as much as the next person. But those have a lot of fun with themselves, and their central characters have enough personality to carry their respective franchises. Chris Hemsworth is the star of Extraction, and while he’s certainly an actor that’s proven capable of bringing both brawn and charm to his roles, this isn’t one of ‘em.

Hemsworth plays Tyler Rake, a mercenary with a death wish and a painful past, and he has about as much charisma as the object he’s named after. There’s only so much he can do - nearly every non-action scene is used for exposition, and Rake is a man of few words who doesn’t care about anything besides his current mission. His latest target is in Bangladesh (which of course calls for that ugly yellow filter that Hollywood loves to slap on foreign countries), where a young boy named Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) has been kidnapped by a powerful drug lord. Rake is told that it will “take an army to get the kid back”. Naturally, he’s able to do it almost single-handedly, using his fists, lots of guns, knives, and (sigh) even a rake. 

The action is fast, brutal, and expertly shot and choreographed. This is the directing debut of Sam Hargrave, who’s been a stunt / fight coordinator for well over a decade in massive films like Avengers, The Hunger Games, and Pirates of the Caribbean, among many others. His expertise certainly doesn’t disappoint in that department; at about the half hour mark, the film goes into a lengthy sequence made to appear as a long, continuous shot. What starts as a thrilling car chase turns into street bawls, a game of hide and seek through apartments, and more. It’s the most obvious moment where Hargrave is showing off what he and his crew are capable of, and to its credit, the sequence is a tremendous showcase of how important great stunt work really is. The big action franchises of today rely heavily on their stunts (often filmed as long takes just like Extraction’s), and it’s another reminder that it is far past time for stunts to be recognized at awards like the Oscars.

If this kind of savage badassery is enough to entertain you, then Extraction definitely delivers. If the sight of a hunky white man killing waves of Bangladeshis (all portrayed by Indian actors, where the movie was actually filmed) rubs you the wrong way, then this might not be for you. It may be offset by the fact that the vast majority of the cast are POC, but still, the violence of the film can sometimes feel overly cruel for no good reason. In one scene, Hemsworth beats the living crap out of a gang of children, smashing heads through car windows and most certainly breaking bones left and right. It’s an act of self-defense (the kids have been forced to try and kill him), but it still comes across as an overtly mean-spirited scene, one that probably could’ve been cut. A subplot involving the child gang is one that feels unnecessary in general - it doesn’t have much of a conclusion by the movie’s end - and it begins with watching a small kid getting tossed off a roof to his death. These kind of gruesome moments can have their place in a film, just not a film like this, where the rest of the killing is over-the-top silliness (remember, he kills someone with a rake at one point). Should we be horrified by the violence or cheer it on? Extraction fails to decide on either one.

Still, my notes that I took while watching this movie end on “Not bad?”, and I mostly stand by that. The plot is thin, but it does manage to have a recurring theme of fatherhood throughout that’s represented by both the story and its characters. It’s basic storytelling, and writer Joe Russo (one half of the directing team behind the last two Captain America and Avengers films), is no amateur, but plenty of similar action flicks fail to do anything besides a lot of shoot shoot punch punch. Extraction is better than them, easily, but by how much? Mileage will vary.