Extraction is streaming on Netflix now.
If you break it down, there are really three kinds of action protagonists. The first is Happy Action Guy. Bruce Willis has played quite a few of them, and despite the fact that his John McClane is frequently scared, annoyed, or pissed-off, his baseline emotion is happiness. We know that because he’s in a good enough mood to crack wise and, if nothing else, amuse himself. Indiana Jones is another Happy Action Guy, and we can see he’s having a reasonably good time raiding tombs and punching Nazis in the kisser. The same goes for Dwayne Johnson, and even when his characters are worked up into a lather, they’re ultimately happy.
Next up is Angry Action Guy. For a while there, Clint Eastwood had the market cornered playing this role, and as Dirty Harry, he was frequently seething, vexed, or in a state of righteous indignation. Mel Gibson also played plenty of Angry Action Guys, before getting sidelined by some troubling mental health and racism issues. As much as Kurt Russell is known to be a laid back and charming dude, his Snake Plissken is one of the great Angry Action Guys in cinema. He exists in a state of nearly constant irritation, and he ultimately wants humanity to leave him the hell alone.
We’re introduced to young Ovi Mahajan Jr. (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) a tween living a real good news/bad news kind of life in Bangladesh. The good news is that he’s a kind and smart kid who will likely go far in life. The bad news is that he might not go that far since his pops, Ovi Mahajan Sr. (Pankaj Tripathi), is one of the two biggest druglords in the city. The other druglord would be Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli), and his diabolical plan involves kidnapping Ovi Jr., holding him for ransom, and generally being kind of a dick about the whole thing.
Ovi Sr. is cooling his heels in prison, but he still (kind of?) cares about his kid. He springs into action and hires the amusingly named Tyler Rake* (Chris Hemsworth) a mopey Australian mercenary. The mission is allegedly simple – rescue Ovi Jr. Tyler’s co-worker/associate is Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani), and she thinks that the mission is quite a bit more difficult than advertised.
From there, Tyler will have to kill a bunch of guys in order to rescue Ovi, then deal with an entire city coming to kill him. He’ll take part in a legit jaw dropping 20-something minute long chase scene, fight child soldiers, get stabbed, hit by a car, kicked, punched, shot, and have harsh language thrown his way. In short, he’s having a rough couple of days.
Extraction is a pretty damn solid action movie, with some pretty damn large problems. First, the good. Director Sam Hargrave made his bones as a stunt coordinator in the MCU, and this is his feature debut. “Bravo!” says I, since he’s made a movie with some top tier action sequences. They’re clever, brutal, and shot cleanly. As a stunt professional, Hargrave doesn’t hide his sequences behind hyperactive editing.** We can see everything from Hemsworth taking apart a room full of luckless goons, a running gun battle through the streets of Bangladesh, and a genuinely gripping car chase with a POV-perspective. If nothing else, Hargrave has delivered some extremely cool scenes.
Yet when we focus on the characters and story, things become significantly less cool. Based on the graphic novel Ciudad, the screenplay was adapted by Joe Russo, one half of the duo that directed Avengers: Endgame. His script isn’t bad, considering it moves very quickly and remembers to take the occasional breather to work on character development. The characters are the problem, though. Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler is stoic, competent, macho, secretly tormented, and entirely uninteresting. Our antagonists, for the most part, seem to be evil for the sake of evil. A henchman tosses a kid off a building. A ganglord delivers sinister dialogue that’s little more than threats. With two exceptions, the villains ain’t so good.
The first exception is Randeep Hooda’s Saju. He’s forced into a lousy situation, and he’s got to try and take out Tyler in order to protect his family, despite the fact that he admires Tyler. This is interesting character development pulled off excellently by Hooda, and I would have liked the script to have been a battle of wills between two sympathetic main characters. The other exception is Suraj Rikame as Farhad, a teenager groomed to become one of Amir’s henchmen. We’re seeing the birth of a child soldier here, a young man forced to make monstrous choices to survive.
A movie where a gigantic white guy kills the hell out of a bunch of brown people isn’t a great look. Let’s not forget that while Extraction has its problems, it delivers a ton of well-shot action and a few surprisingly interesting supporting characters.
*Wondering if Tyler Rake kills someone with a rake? Well…yes, obviously.
**Looking at you, The Bourne Supremacy.