Extraction 2
EXTRACTION 2
Genre: Action thriller
Director: Sam Hargrave
Released: 2023
The first Extraction movie, released in 2020 on Netflix, was a pretty popular film. It didn't exactly hit with critics, but audiences hungry for simple, unpretentious, blockbusting fun (that didn't involve capes or laser-eyes) devoured it and made it one of Netflix's biggest hits of the year. This inevitably led to a sequel, which I heard about whilst perusing Rotten Tomatoes and, having nothing better to do on a quiet Tuesday night, compelled me to take in both movies in one sitting.
The first movie can only be described as Call of Duty: the Movie. It features a gruff, stony-faced military man as our protagonist, he fights through the grimy streets of a foreign city against wave upon wave of faceless NPCs, and most injuries can be recovered from by hunkering down for a bit until the screen clears of all the bloody splotches and the sound of a beating heart fades away. The action was hard hitting and well shot and it was all wrapped up in undeniably slick presentation, but it was ultimately just empty calories that left me filled but not fulfilled, if you take my meaning.
This brings us to the aforementioned inevitable sequel, which makes some unquestionable improvements, but, sticking with the video game metaphor, are largely confined to quality of life improvements that leave the underlying formula largely unchanged. If the first movie worked for you, that means you'll probably be pleased with this one, but if you were hoping that the series would graduate from McDonald's to Restaurant Guy Savoy, I'm sorry to report it barely makes it to Culver's.
Extraction 2 picks up immediately after the events of Extraction 1 with Chris Hemsworth's Tyler Rake being fished out of a river, having been shot in the throat and back and dumped off a bridge in the climax of the preceding film. Thankfully, blood loss, severe tissue damage, and oxygen deprivation are scared of Tyler's biceps or something, so they let him off the hook and after a coma and a few months in the hospital, his fixer Nik (played by Golshifteh Farahani) deposits him in a cabin in the Austrian wilderness to "find out" why he fought his way back from such devastating injuries. He loafs about for a while, but pretty soon a nameless man played by an always-welcome Idris Elba shows up to enlist him to break his ex-wife's sister Ketevan out of a Georgian prison where she is being held captive by her husband Davit, one half of the leadership team of a criminal enterprise so lucrative and powerful that it essentially runs the country. Tyler is still a little worse for wear, but a quick montage of hitting things with an axe sees him back to top form and he takes the job. Things get complicated fast, of course, and soon he finds himself pitted against Davit's brother Zurab and his army of thugs as Tyler tries to get his former sister-in-law, her daughter, and her conflicted son to safety.
Extraction 2, much like its predecessor, takes place across three Call of Duty levels: Prison Break, Early Checkout, and Brotherly Love, with some cutscenes in between to give all the shooting and shouting narrative justification. These parts are legitimately excellent: they're shot without rapid edits or excessive shaky cam, the sound design is punchy and full bodied to lend extra weight to every punch and shot, and the choreography is fast and brutal. I found myself verbally reacting to some of the movie's more creative takedowns and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Prison Break is purported to have been filmed in one long, unbroken shot (although I'm a bit skeptical there are still long stretches of obvious oners that I deeply respect).
Similarly, I continue to appreciate Extraction's relative restraint when it comes to things like camera work, color grading, and lighting. There's no obnoxious dark filter or desaturation to try to make things look more gritty, no insane shaky-cam or sudden zooms that make it feel like the cameraman was drunk, and scenes are lit so I can actually see what's happening. We finally seem to be moving away from the distracting flourishes and desperate exaggerations of the early 2000s in action movies that conflated boring, gray color palettes and cinematography inspired by on the ground recordings of earthquakes with engaging visual style (if you don't know what I'm talking about watch any Zach Snyder film), and the paradigm shift could not be more welcome if you ask me.
Unfortunately, all this technical accomplishment is tied to story and characters that are just absolute nothing burgers. Tyler Rake is gamely played by Chris Hemsworth, but he doesn't have any real personality outside of mopiness interspersed with moments of steely-eyed determination. He's got a dead son and an ex-wife, but the most appreciable impact they have on his character is that sometimes he stares teary-eyed into the middle distance having blurry flashbacks about them, they don't really feel like they are keys to his actions and choices. Like most of the cast, he doesn't have any conflict or personal growth that would lead to a deeper sense of investment. Ketevan's son Sandro is the only one for whom conflict is really attempted, torn as he is between loyalty to his mother and his uncle, but we don't get nearly enough time with him to better understand his motivations or why he is so invested in the word of his father and uncle. He also doesn't have anything else going on, character-wise, that would flesh him out or make him likeable enough to get truly invested in his struggle, literally the only thing he does is argue with people about who killed who and who's more deserving of death.
Speaking of which, Extraction 2 repeats the first film's error in having a really pathetic antagonist. The first movie was overseen by a drug lord who, and I cannot stress this enough, was thinner than a proton. Occasionally we would cut back to him, but he didn't do anything aside from issue slight variations on the same "go-kill-the-protagonist-guy" order to various, equally uninteresting subordinates. An effort was clearly made to make Zurab more involved in the proceedings, at least he actually interacts with Tyler a few times, but he's still painfully underdeveloped, and the very brief flashbacks we get to his upbringing feel like an afterthought's afterthought to make him feel like less of a cardboard cutout. If this was the best the writer's could do, I think I would have preferred that they not even try and just have him be a simple muscle-headed thug out to kill Tyler because he interfered with his criminal empire.
Ultimately, then, that's what I took from both Extraction movies: if you're going to be a generic action movie about a generic character doing generic missions, just lean into your strengths and eat the loss in the character department. When I think about my favorite unpretentious, just for fun blockbuster movies, the thing that unifies them is that they don't really try to have complex characters, they embrace simplicity and give you what you came for. Extraction, on the other hand, is trying to make its characters more than that what they are, but the effort just ends up drawing attention to how flat they are and how half-hearted their attempts are. I wasn't expecting anything mind-blowing from either of these movies, I was just there because I heard they had cool action, and that's definitely there, but the writers seem to think they have obligations to cram in extra stuff that they didn't take the time to implement or craft properly, which leaves us with a movie that can't get out of its own way. This is a popcorn thriller through-and-through, and it accomplishes its mission as it relates to the thrills, but nothing else.
C+
Genre: Action thriller
Director: Sam Hargrave
Released: 2023
The first Extraction movie, released in 2020 on Netflix, was a pretty popular film. It didn't exactly hit with critics, but audiences hungry for simple, unpretentious, blockbusting fun (that didn't involve capes or laser-eyes) devoured it and made it one of Netflix's biggest hits of the year. This inevitably led to a sequel, which I heard about whilst perusing Rotten Tomatoes and, having nothing better to do on a quiet Tuesday night, compelled me to take in both movies in one sitting.
The first movie can only be described as Call of Duty: the Movie. It features a gruff, stony-faced military man as our protagonist, he fights through the grimy streets of a foreign city against wave upon wave of faceless NPCs, and most injuries can be recovered from by hunkering down for a bit until the screen clears of all the bloody splotches and the sound of a beating heart fades away. The action was hard hitting and well shot and it was all wrapped up in undeniably slick presentation, but it was ultimately just empty calories that left me filled but not fulfilled, if you take my meaning.
This brings us to the aforementioned inevitable sequel, which makes some unquestionable improvements, but, sticking with the video game metaphor, are largely confined to quality of life improvements that leave the underlying formula largely unchanged. If the first movie worked for you, that means you'll probably be pleased with this one, but if you were hoping that the series would graduate from McDonald's to Restaurant Guy Savoy, I'm sorry to report it barely makes it to Culver's.
Extraction 2 picks up immediately after the events of Extraction 1 with Chris Hemsworth's Tyler Rake being fished out of a river, having been shot in the throat and back and dumped off a bridge in the climax of the preceding film. Thankfully, blood loss, severe tissue damage, and oxygen deprivation are scared of Tyler's biceps or something, so they let him off the hook and after a coma and a few months in the hospital, his fixer Nik (played by Golshifteh Farahani) deposits him in a cabin in the Austrian wilderness to "find out" why he fought his way back from such devastating injuries. He loafs about for a while, but pretty soon a nameless man played by an always-welcome Idris Elba shows up to enlist him to break his ex-wife's sister Ketevan out of a Georgian prison where she is being held captive by her husband Davit, one half of the leadership team of a criminal enterprise so lucrative and powerful that it essentially runs the country. Tyler is still a little worse for wear, but a quick montage of hitting things with an axe sees him back to top form and he takes the job. Things get complicated fast, of course, and soon he finds himself pitted against Davit's brother Zurab and his army of thugs as Tyler tries to get his former sister-in-law, her daughter, and her conflicted son to safety.
Extraction 2, much like its predecessor, takes place across three Call of Duty levels: Prison Break, Early Checkout, and Brotherly Love, with some cutscenes in between to give all the shooting and shouting narrative justification. These parts are legitimately excellent: they're shot without rapid edits or excessive shaky cam, the sound design is punchy and full bodied to lend extra weight to every punch and shot, and the choreography is fast and brutal. I found myself verbally reacting to some of the movie's more creative takedowns and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Prison Break is purported to have been filmed in one long, unbroken shot (although I'm a bit skeptical there are still long stretches of obvious oners that I deeply respect).
Similarly, I continue to appreciate Extraction's relative restraint when it comes to things like camera work, color grading, and lighting. There's no obnoxious dark filter or desaturation to try to make things look more gritty, no insane shaky-cam or sudden zooms that make it feel like the cameraman was drunk, and scenes are lit so I can actually see what's happening. We finally seem to be moving away from the distracting flourishes and desperate exaggerations of the early 2000s in action movies that conflated boring, gray color palettes and cinematography inspired by on the ground recordings of earthquakes with engaging visual style (if you don't know what I'm talking about watch any Zach Snyder film), and the paradigm shift could not be more welcome if you ask me.
Unfortunately, all this technical accomplishment is tied to story and characters that are just absolute nothing burgers. Tyler Rake is gamely played by Chris Hemsworth, but he doesn't have any real personality outside of mopiness interspersed with moments of steely-eyed determination. He's got a dead son and an ex-wife, but the most appreciable impact they have on his character is that sometimes he stares teary-eyed into the middle distance having blurry flashbacks about them, they don't really feel like they are keys to his actions and choices. Like most of the cast, he doesn't have any conflict or personal growth that would lead to a deeper sense of investment. Ketevan's son Sandro is the only one for whom conflict is really attempted, torn as he is between loyalty to his mother and his uncle, but we don't get nearly enough time with him to better understand his motivations or why he is so invested in the word of his father and uncle. He also doesn't have anything else going on, character-wise, that would flesh him out or make him likeable enough to get truly invested in his struggle, literally the only thing he does is argue with people about who killed who and who's more deserving of death.
Speaking of which, Extraction 2 repeats the first film's error in having a really pathetic antagonist. The first movie was overseen by a drug lord who, and I cannot stress this enough, was thinner than a proton. Occasionally we would cut back to him, but he didn't do anything aside from issue slight variations on the same "go-kill-the-protagonist-guy" order to various, equally uninteresting subordinates. An effort was clearly made to make Zurab more involved in the proceedings, at least he actually interacts with Tyler a few times, but he's still painfully underdeveloped, and the very brief flashbacks we get to his upbringing feel like an afterthought's afterthought to make him feel like less of a cardboard cutout. If this was the best the writer's could do, I think I would have preferred that they not even try and just have him be a simple muscle-headed thug out to kill Tyler because he interfered with his criminal empire.
Ultimately, then, that's what I took from both Extraction movies: if you're going to be a generic action movie about a generic character doing generic missions, just lean into your strengths and eat the loss in the character department. When I think about my favorite unpretentious, just for fun blockbuster movies, the thing that unifies them is that they don't really try to have complex characters, they embrace simplicity and give you what you came for. Extraction, on the other hand, is trying to make its characters more than that what they are, but the effort just ends up drawing attention to how flat they are and how half-hearted their attempts are. I wasn't expecting anything mind-blowing from either of these movies, I was just there because I heard they had cool action, and that's definitely there, but the writers seem to think they have obligations to cram in extra stuff that they didn't take the time to implement or craft properly, which leaves us with a movie that can't get out of its own way. This is a popcorn thriller through-and-through, and it accomplishes its mission as it relates to the thrills, but nothing else.
C+
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