REVIEW: 'Extraction' highlights action, the rest is just distraction
Chris Hemsworth and Rudhraksh Jaiswal in Extraction, directed by Sam Hargrave.
We can go through a litany of troublesome themes when it comes to action films. Too often, the white guy is always the hero. Bullets do extreme amounts of damage, except only to the main character. Drug lords are always the “Pablo Escobar of (blank)”, because the only way to illicit real danger is to mention Pablo Escobar. Betrayals are common and the troubled past of a hero comes back to haunt him.
That, in a nutshell, is Extraction, Netflix’s action shoot ‘em up starring Chris Hemsworth as Tyler Rake, a former Australian special forces operator turned mercenary who is tasked to retrieve Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the son of an Indian crime lord, who has been kidnapped by a rival gang led by Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli), a Bangladeshi crime lord. Rake is aided by his handler, Nik (Golshifteh Farahani), and an old friend, Gaspar (David Harbour), but it’s further complicated by Ovi’s personal bodyguard, Saju (Randeep Hooda), who is looking to rescue Ovi himself, and Farhad (Suraj Rikame), a young street thug who is eager to prove himself to Amir.
It’s a heavy-handed action film, with each cliché delivered to you hand over fist. When we meet Tyler, he casually jumps off a big cliff and into the water, where he stays submerged. He’s drowning himself with the heavy memories of a troubled past, which the film is all too eager to remind you any time there’s a quiet moment. And in two of the film’s final two scenes, water again is used to imply a cleanse. It’s only through Hemsworth’s acting that any of this bearable, because the true star of Extraction is not its skin-deep plot nor its barely-there character development, but the action choreography of director Sam Hargrave, himself a stunt coordinator for the MCU franchise. Hemsworth is truly a one-man army, as close as you can get to Man on Fire without naming him John Creasy, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that the working title of the film at one point was Out of the Fire.
This is where Extraction really shines, where the action is clear and coherent and the lack of hyperactive editing elevates the material. A close-up of a punch doesn’t mean anything, but with a wide shot where the punch is seen and the body reacts to it is far more effective (modern martial arts films are very guilty of this). Hemsworth takes a ton of damage, but he also dishes it pretty darn good as well, using guns and knives, but also doors and cups, and in one unintentionally funny moment, slaps a young thug across the face after he attempts to stab him. The car chases are just as exciting, with Hargrave squeezing out as much as he can with the short, crowded streets of Dhaka.
Which brings me to my next point, and tangentially related to the one I recently raised about Tigertail, another Netflix original – are we ever going to get Asians right in western films? The problem with the white saviour in this film is obvious, but again the film takes little to no care in representation. Someone far more knowledgeable about Bangladesh and India pointed out the careless representations, and so we continue to ask ourselves: why? Why do all drug lords have moustaches? Why are all elite police forces incompetent? Why are all non-whites always painted with broad strokes? Why are accents never accurate? These may never be top priorities for an action film, and perhaps Dhaka will never care about its place in Hollywood, but it’s a continually frustrating aspect of white Hollywood that seems so easy to fix, yet no one ever bothers to mention it. Except me, I guess.
Extraction gets two and a half stars out of four.
