directed by Sam Hargrave
written by Joe Russo
I'll be honest; I thought so little of the first Extraction film that I didn't bother to watch it until nearly a year after its release, content to watch it on my phone while waiting for my wife. I had no interest in most of Netflix's movies, finding them to be generic, forgettable affairs reminiscent of the straight-to-cable movies of old. I ended up enjoying it way more than I thought I would, so much so that when the sequel, Extraction 2 dropped last Friday, I made sure to catch it on the biggest screen I had access to, so I plopped in front of my modestly-sized TV and tuned in.
At the end of the first movie, mercenary/exfiltration expert Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) was shot in the neck and fell off a bridge in India, and as a result, he spends much of the beginning of this movie being nursed back to health by his colleagues Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) and her brother Yaz (Adam Bessa). He is then apparently retired and living in a cabin in Austria when he is approached by a mysterious man (Idris Elba) who has a job for him: exfiltrate the wife of a vicious Georgian crime lord (Tornike Bziava) and her kids from the prison in which he has forced them to live alongside him as he serves his prison sentence. It's a bit personal for him, as well; the wife Ketevan (Tinitin Dalakishvili) is the sister of Rake's ex-wife Mia (Olga Kurylenko). What is supposed to be a surgical exfiltration gets extremely violent, and as result, Tyler and his team have the crime lord's entire gang, led by his vengeful brother (Tornike Gogrichiani) hot on their heels as they attempt to flee the country with Ketevan and her kids Sandro (Andro Japaridze) and Nina (Miriam and Marta Kovziashvili). Will they make it out?
As an action movie, this film ticks all the boxes for me: just enough story to keep everything that happens coherent, actors with strong screen presence, and tightly-choreographed and shot action sequences with striking visuals and a propulsive soundtrack. This has all the grit of the best movies from the John Wick franchise and, if I'm honest, never feels repetitive the way some films from that franchise often did. Sure, the plot barely holds the whole thing together and would probably not stand up to anything even resembling scrutiny, but director Sam Hargrave, his cast and crew keep things moving along so briskly that it isn't worth taking the time to wonder if things make sense. It's just a rip-roaring, good time in much the same way the first one was, only this time the storytelling feels even tighter.
Outside of his tenure as Marvel Studios' Thor movies there is not a whole lot that I have liked Australian actor Chris Hemsworth in, but at least that list has grown. I thought he was great as James Hunt in Ron Howards' criminally-underappreciated Formula One film Rush, and now, well, I think he's great here. I also especially liked Golshifteh Farahani's Niki, a hard-boiled, ass kicking woman that puts to shame a great majority of the so-called "strong female characters" infesting too many movies these days. There's not much to say about the cookie-cutter bad guys, but the hell they put our heroes through made for some incredibly engaging viewing.
My only real gripe with this movie, if I'm perfectly honest, has little to do with its craft and everything to do with Netflix's insistence to keep a film like this, which would be perfectly at home on the big screen making big money, away from movie theaters. It is honestly frustrating to see a wide-screen adventure like this confined to a platform which quite frankly diminishes the viewer's experience, and yes, I have to take that against the filmmakers who agreed to make this movie under those conditions.
It seems that a third installment of this franchise has already been greenlit, and I, for one, would honestly love to see it up on a movie screen.
8/10
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