Holy cow. I dare anyone to keep tabs of the body
count in this film. You would need a super-computer. It felt like the entire
Bangladesh army is wiped out - by two men and a woman. Bangladesh could not
have been too happy about that - perhaps the reason why it was mainly shot
in India and then in Thailand - though I have to admit I am not sure what
was shot in Thailand - the bridge scene I expect. Kind of stupid to say this
feels rather generic these days when twenty-years ago it would have been
astonishing for the violence. Plots like this write themselves - tough guy
in a black place finds redemption in saving a young boy and killing hundreds
doing it. Does anyone ever ask themselves, is the boy's life worth all these
dead? In movies, of course not.
Tyler Rake is played by the Hemsworth brother
who played Thor - he should have brought his hammer along. I think he showed
more emotion as a God than he does as a human. He is broke and takes an assignment
to save a boy who has been kidnapped. A little more complicated than that.
The boy is the son of a Mumbai gangster in jail and the kidnapper is the
biggest gangster in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He owns the cops, the military and
every hoodlum in the city. Probably the rats in the sewers too. The boy is
being held in Dhaka. This should be easy. His partner Nik played by Iranian
actress Golshifteh Farahani advises him to turn it down as being too dangerous,
but what sort of movie would that be. The actress is forbidden to go back
to Iran because she appeared in a Western film without the proper female
clothes on.
The action is over the top. Really well
done at times. Sure, Hemsworth is too big for the bad guys to keep missing
but these are slime and seeing them killed by the dozens is rather fun. There
are two set-pieces that are worth the price of admission - even at today's
inflated prices. I only wish they had been in a Hong Kong film. He has rescued
the boy and is on the run from cops everywhere. They go into this warren
of small one room apartments with music playing or food cooking on the stove
and it is one shootout after another. What a Hong Kong choreographer could
have done with that locale.
Another party enters into the film - Saju
(Bollywood actor Randeep Hooda) who is the right-hand man of the Mumbai gangster
and feels he has to save the boy or his family will be killed. He is pretty
awesome and does more than his share of killing. They all end up on
the bridge to escape - hundreds of stopped cars, the army, the cops, helicopters,
the boy, Saju, Rake and Nik and it goes extreme in the body count calculation.
It all seems pretty dire, but there was a sequel three years later.
Extraction 2
Director:Sam Hargrave Year:
2023 Rating: 7.0 This being the
sequel to the 2020 film and again starring Chris Hemsworth, I guess it is
no longer a spoiler to write that he survived the first one as did his partner
Golshifteh Farahani who also appears in this one. It was not a sure thing
as they did a Sherlock Holmes Reichenbach Falls style of an ending. I expect
they wanted to see how the film did at Netflix before they decided on whether
to make a sequel. It did quite well in terms of views. I mean these films
on Netflix don't come cheap. Hemsworth was paid $20 million for this film.
That is insane of course but the free market, you know. And it isn't my money,
so why not? This is a fine follow-up with loads of absurd high octave action.
Films like this live or die on their action set-pieces - how big are they,
how explosive, how expensive, how original - and this has two of them that
meet all those criteria. Though for me, it was that final shot that I enjoyed
the most.
As important as those set-pieces are and
as long as they must have taken to film, what sets this film apart to some
degree from all the other over the top action films is the relationship between
the Hemsworth character Rake and his female partner Nik Khan. It is not a
romantic one nor a Thin Man one - but one of deep loyalty, having each other's
backs, a wiliness to die or kill for them. Rake is the action juggernaut
while Nik does all the planning and organizing - but she is pretty handy
with a gun as well. In the first film that skill doesn't show up till the
ending at the bridge - but here they really throw her into it right from
the beginning and she is awesome. I bet Golshifteh Farahani never thought
she was going to become an action star when she acted in Iranian dramas back
home. As I mentioned in the review of the first one, she has been banned
from returning to her country because she didn't wear a hijab in an American
film - so the chances of a romantic interlude between the two of them is
unlikely unless she never wants to go back. Her father is a theater director
back in Iran - she won awards there for acting at the age of fourteen.
Rake drags himself out of the river ridden
with bullet holes and bruises - and gets taken to a hospital in Dubai for
a long recovery - Nik at his side all the time. Hemsworth gets to do a bit
of everything in this film other than smile. He figures he is out of the
business until Idris Elba shows up in a cameo to hire him. Rake's wife wants
him to rescue her sister and her two children who are in prison in Georgia
- the country. Her husband who is also imprisoned is one of two brothers
who run all the crime activities in that country and have a huge army of
killers. Yes, Eastern Europeans are the vicious villains once again.
The wife wants out. When Rake's wife shows up at the end, it is a nice little
cameo from a favorite of mine. But she should have killed a few of the bad
guys as well. It is what she does best. Maybe she will get a chance if there
are sequels.
In an incredible set-piece that starts slow
with Rake bribing his way into the prison turns into a colossal action fight
through the prison yard of the wretched of humanity - onto a highspeed train
waiting for them and then being attacked by hordes of men and helicopters.
Criminals come much better prepared and armed than before. Totally ridiculous
and very entertaining. The second set-piece comes about twenty-minutes later
in a high rise building and is just as ridiculous and entertaining. The logistics
and editing of putting these together to make sense to the viewer boggles
my mind. How much money were they being paid to rescue the woman? How rich
is Nik's ex-wife? Renting trains don't come cheap. It appears that the Russo
Brothers have plans to make this into another one of those giant franchises
with spinoffs of other characters - and why not. That is the cinematic landscape
we live in now.
