The first thing you need to know about Extraction, a new Netflix written by Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo, is that Chris Hemsworth’s apparently indestructible action man character is called Tyler Rake. Tyler. Rake. Remember that last bit; it’s important.
The second thing is that, in early stages of the film, as he is fighting his way through a group of 20-odd soldiers, he uses an actual rake as a weapon to kill two people. First, he jabs the pointy bits into someone’s torso and then he rams it into someone else’s face.
Now you’ll have some idea of what you’re getting yourself into with this movie. It’s relentlessly stupid and entirely predictable, but once you take it at face value, it’s an enjoyable enough way to while away two hours.
Extraction is the latest effort on the part of the Russo brothers to turn the Avengers into classic action stars, having apparently been given carte blanche by movie studios after pulling in more than $4 billion with the Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame duo. After giving Chadwick Boseman his Bruce Willis moment in cop thriller 21 Bridges earlier this year and Tom Holland set to play a drug-addicted bank robber in next year's Cherry, they’ve let Hemsworth have a deserved go as a leading man in this action flick, which owes a debt to Tony Scott’s Man On Fire.
Rake is an Aussie mercenary who has been paid to retrieve the son of a Bangladeshi drug dealer who has been kidnapped by a rival. The film opens with him in the midst of a shootout that he appears to be losing, before taking us back to the beginning of the story, where we see him take on the job.
We meet the kid, Ovi, a good-natured 15-year-old, and the drug lord who orders his kidnapping, a cartoonish villain who controls a troupe of child soldiers as well as actual soldiers. When the children misbehave, he demands they cut off their own fingers or, worse, throws them off of the roof. In other words, he’s a bad guy.
Tyler, on the other hand, is good, but he’s troubled. We catch blurry glimpses of a child on a beach in brief flashbacks, suggesting there’s trauma in his past that makes him want to save this kid.
The plan is simple: go and extract (see?) the boy from his captors, return him to his father and receive payment. But, oh, wait! They’ve been doubled-crossed. And, oh, no! Not again...
The film is mostly made up of long tracking shots of Hemsworth moving through enemy territory, creatively dispatching soldiers who seem to be far worse at this whole shoot-em-up thing than he is, despite being heavily armed. The action scenes are what it does best, too. The film is directed by Sam Hargrave, a former stunt coordinator who has worked with both the Russos and Hemsworth on the Avengers films. And he clearly knows what he’s doing: the fights are a thing of beauty, like an aggressive and bloody dance, choreographed to perfection. They’re as visceral as anything we’ve seen recently and up there with the likes of those out of Mission Impossible 6 and the John Wick series (the pinnacle of modern stunts). It's almost worth watching for the action scenes alone.
Somewhere along the way, David Harbour from Stranger Things makes a cameo and chews some scenery, at one point delivering a monologue about shooting doves. It’s an entirely unnecessary role, but it’s nice to see he’s enjoying himself. And there’s a couple of dodgy subplots that don’t quite get the time or attention they deserve and feel like they exist to paper over some cracks in the screenplay, such as the child soldier who vows revenge against Rake.
Children have a bad time of it in this movie in general. Rake beats the living hell out of a few of them, at one point slamming one’s head through a car window. It takes some of the sting out of the emotional subtext of the film: that children are civilians in the drug war and should be protected at all cost.
As for Hemsworth as the new Denzel? He's good! With better material – and a better character name – he might be an action legend yet.
Extraction is out now on Netflix
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