In many ways, Sam Hargrave’s knuckle breaking firecracker of an action flick was the perfect example of the virtues of streaming. Standing out amid a sea of bland of direct to streaming, stripped back, action thrillers, the sight of a bloodied Chris Hemsworth continually punching, shooting or bludgeoning his way though Bangladesh in order to save the kidnapped son of an Indian drug lord was like meat to starving cinemagoers, denied their blockbuster fix due to global lockdown.
Yes, the plot was thinner than Sean Connery’s mid-Bond hairline, but Extraction featured world class action sequences during to its director’s past as a stuntman and its star’s commitment to clench-jawed badassery and the centre piece was an astonishing extended, “unbroken” fight/chase scene that, regardless of you opinion of the rest of the film, took you to action movie Valhalla and back. Well, Hemsworth’s amusingly named Tyler Rake is back despite seemingly having succumbed to his many wounds at the end of the last movie; will this second go-round still manage to extract the same amount of thrills?
After his punctured body is dragged from a Bangladeshi river with a pulse weaker than a beer at a music festival, Tyler Rake is miraculously revived and languishes in a coma under the watchful eye of his handler, Nik Kahn and her garish brother Yaz. Upon awakening, Rake can’t figure out why he didn’t just die as he is still understandably hollowed out by the decision to walk out on his son due to him being unable to watch him die of lymphoma, but after he has struggled through nine, gruelling months of physio therapy, he is approached by the mysterious Alcott who offers him a mission so tantalising, it spurs him back into action.
Getting his edge back by the tried and true method of having a training montage at a snowy cabin, Rake’s task is to break into a Georgian prison to break out the wife and two children of Davit Radiani, a particularly vicious mob boss who has them there against their will to “protect” them from his equally brutal rivals – despite many of them being incarcerated in the same building.
Why would Rake suddenly think that this mission is so important? Simple, Davit’s wife, Ketevan, is Rake’s sister-in-law and our tormented hero aims to make it easier to look at himself in the mirror by roping in Nik and Yaz to staging an impressive break out that descends into hellish chaos almost the very moment it gets underway.
In the wreckage strewn aftermath, Rake, Nik and Yaz have Ketevan, her defiant son Sandro and his infant sister Nina in tow, but they also have Davit’s ridiculously loyal brother, Zurab, in pursuit who will stop at nothing until he kills…. well, everybody.
The real issue is that the confused Sandro is still a little too much under his father’s influence and no matter where Rake takes them, all ut will take is one rash phone call to bring it all crashing down.
Both Extraction movies obviously don’t feel the need to over complicate things – I’d be stunned if the final screenplay wasn’t the size of a pamphlet – so neither will I: if you complained that the first movie, lockdown or not, was more a case of matter over mind, then you’d be better off giving Extraction 2 a berth the size of a radius of a nuclear blast. In fact, in some ways, the sequel is even lighter in plot than its already lean predecessor as the central connection between a grieving Rake and the young man he’s trying to extract that drove it is all but missing here. Any bonding or casual conversation Rake has with the people hes trying to save this time, is kept to a minimum due to either the fact that Sandro is openly hostile or it gets drowned out by the spectacular action, but taken as a bullet-strewn thriller boiled to its most purest form, its impact is seismic.
The real plot here is whether our hero can get from A to B and keep C safe while trying not to be killed by the rest of the alphabet and taken as a thrilling, as-it-happens slice of carnage, its utterly magnificent with its first set piece being a fabricated “in one shot” sequence that could easily take gold when stacked up to anything else released this year.
Lasting an astonishing twenty one minutes, you can’t help but goggle at the screen as the high octane action starts in the deepest, darkest corner of a Russian prison and slashes and shoots it’s way into the middle of the most animalistic prison riot since The Raid 2 where it promptly sets part of its hero on fire (it’s fine, he puts it out by naturally punching a dude in the face). From there we segue to a vehicles chasing each other through the woods as RPGs whizz around like mosquitoes only to finish up with an insane brawl on a speeding train that sees helicopters shot out of the air with an M60. It’s a stunning achievement and a giddily thrilling experience that make you wonder how Hargraves and Hemsworth could ever hope to top it short of making half the movie appear to be shot in one take. Thankfully, even though it admittedly makes the movie peak early, a mid-film brawl that sees Rake slaughter people with an entire gym and fight a guy on the side of a skyscraper balances things out a little.
The downpoint is that compared to these two massive brouhahas, the final showdown is noticably more subdued, even if it involves Rake and Zurab destroying the interior of an abandoned church as they go above and beyond trying to kill each other with hacksaws and screwdrivers. It’s a common problem with action movies that they blow their wad early like a virgin on prom night , so it isn’t an issue, but, if I’m being totally honest, the movie really could have ended at around the hour and twenty mark if Rake had managed to kill his enemy on the side of that skyscraper and nobody would have been any the wiser.
Aside from Hemsworth and the legions of stuntmen who no doubt risked their quality of life in order to bring Hargrave’s violent vision to life, the majority of the other actors are mostly inconsequential. Idris Elba’s much ballyhooed appearance isn’t much more than a charismatic cameo while Ketevan barely registers besides her terrified eyes and Sandro is not much more than a moody, teenaged plot device. But thankfully Golshifteh Farahani and Adam Bessa’s returning Nik and Yaz offer suitable back up even if their banter is less valuable than their expert covering fire.
The first Extraction became one of the most watched movies that Netflix ever financed and Extraction 2 will no doubt repeat the trick and I for one will be immensely grateful because even though Hemsworth’s Rake isn’t that much more that a hype-violent blank slate with a fetching haircut, Hargrave’s eye for annihilation is second to none.
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