A pile of guns, an exotic location, a no-frills script, and a leading man with ostentatious muscles. So simple are the ingredients, it’s a wonder Netflix doesn’t make a film like Extraction every week.
Set mostly in Dhaka, Bangladesh, with early action in Mumbai, India, this debut feature from former stunt coordinator Sam Hargrave is a swinging fist of a movie — a neck-snapping rampage whose hero racks up multiple kills before he speaks his first word. At once drearily competent and utterly bereft of charm, Extraction is The Bourne Identity without the stylishness, Indiana Jones without the visual gags, and Taken without the Liam Neeson. It isn’t particularly terrible, all things considered. It’s just the sort of picture that’s best enjoyed on a Tuesday morning, in one’s underwear, while checking emails.
Featuring the punishingly bland Chris Hemsworth, Extraction tells the story of Tyler Rake, a mercenary and former soldier who makes up for his lack of charisma with a truly impressive ability to take a bullet. Summoned to Dhaka to rescue a drug lord’s kidnapped son (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), Tyler must make his way through paid-off Bangladeshi soldiers, gangs of feral youths, and an ex-Special Forces goon (Randeep Hooda) whose skill set is almost as murderous as his own. Monitoring events from an urban rooftop is Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli), a notorious criminal and child snatcher whose weary maliciousness is one of the film’s few interesting choices. In the shadows, directing backup, is Tyler’s partner, Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani), a beautiful but underwritten female operative whose job consists primarily of talking into a cellphone.
Though Extraction dutifully gives Tyler enough backstory to justify his existence in a major motion picture, Hargrave and screenwriter Joe Russo are plainly less interested in character development than in finding novel ways for henchmen to die. Tyler’s foes are choked, run over, thrown from buildings, bludgeoned by kitchen tables, flung into exposed masonry, and gouged with gardening tools. So elaborate are the movie’s fight-to-the-death sequences that one almost feels sorry for the dozen or so villains who are killed, boringly, by a sniper.
That Extraction’s stunts are skillfully executed has been the consensus of much of the film’s early criticism, with Rolling Stone noting that “there are times when the kamikaze fireworks are damn impressive” and the Los Angeles Times declaring the movie “an excellent piece of action filmmaking.” Less successful by far, however, are the scenes in which bodies aren’t being hurled across the screen and Extraction is forced to sink or swim on the strength of its plot and acting. To a great degree, the blame for this failure must be placed at the feet of Hemsworth, a performer of such woodenness that he barely has chemistry with his gun. Yet the film does its star no favors by saddling his character with an interior life so impoverished it can be summed up with six words: “His child died, and he’s sad.” Such a history may provide the barest of motivations, but it certainly doesn’t make Tyler any more likable, compelling, or complex.
As for Extraction’s other flaws, they are in large part the errors of continuity, cinematography, and pacing that one associates with a rookie director. How, for example, is Asif’s gang of street toughs able to locate Tyler in the middle of the night in hypercrowded Bangladesh? Why must the central chase scene be filmed in such a way that viewers see the car’s inhabitants but little of the chaos through which they’re speeding? Who decided that the climactic shootout should be so plodding and repetitive? Like many a middling action flick, Extraction would have benefited mightily from the focus group attention of people who don’t much like action flicks. Who better to alert Hargrave to what doesn’t work, makes no sense, or is just plain dumb?
If the movie has a saving grace beyond the creativity of its kills, it is the work of its two secondary stars, Jaiswal and Hooda. As the adolescent hostage whom Tyler must escort to safety, Jaiswal brings a range of believable emotions to his role, playing the teenager’s terror and compassion with equal dexterity. As Tyler’s employer-turned-nemesis, Hooda gives the layered and absorbing performance that completely evaded Hemsworth. So superior a talent is Hooda, in fact, that one wonders whether Extraction might have worked better as his story: an Indian mercenary does battle with his insipid American counterpart. Given Hollywood’s tendency to cut its movies differently for overseas consumption, it’s not impossible that some version of that plan is currently in the works.
In the meantime, audiences the world over will have to make do with Extraction as it currently exists: violent, ridiculous, and as alternately frenetic and dull as the popular culture that produced it. It isn’t a very good film, but hey, it’s streaming now, and it’s only a click or two away. This isn’t the time to be picky. We’ll watch it.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
