Review: Extraction (2020)

Sam Hargrave’s Extraction is the latest film in the current trend of gritty action movies centred around one standout sequence shot and edited to look like one continuous take. Luckily, it’s better than the likes of Atomic Blonde (2018) and other movies that tried to jump onto the bandwagon started by the surprise success of John Wick (2014). To be clear, it has its problems. For one, it runs too long, which is common for Netflix Originals. It also mistakes grit for depth, which is standard for most action movies in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood ascendance. But it succeeds as a well-choreographed action film that’s sufficiently clever in its staging and action sequences. The aforementioned long-take action scene, which lasts around 20 minutes, is the cherry on top that makes it worth a watch on streaming.

The film follows Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake, a black ops operator drinking away his pain in the Kimberley, Australia at the beginning of the film. Through out-of-focus snippets of flashbacks, we surmise that Tyler lost a son, which has robbed his life of all meaning.It apparently also gives him the necessary psychological pain to explain why he kills people for a living. If there’s a primary fault in Extraction, it’s that it leans too heavily on this kind of conventional shorthand for action heroes, with Tyler having such deep trauma about the loss of his son that it motivates his every single action in the film. There’s nothing wrong with giving an action hero a backstory, but it’s almost farcical at this point for every single action hero to be so burdened with psychological torment that their life of violence is simply a grand metaphor of self-destruction. It’s not only simplistic psychology, but cliched storytelling.

In the film, this pain motivates Tyler to take the job to rescue Ovi Mahajan (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the teenage son of a Mumbai drug baron who has been kidnapped by a Bangladeshi rival, Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli). In a brutal opening sequence, we watch Ovi sneak away from his family compound to go to a party with friends, only for police officers to find him and his friends smoking a joint outside the party, promptly shoot the friend in the head, kidnap Ovi, and take him to to the metropolis of Dhaka, across the Bangladeshi border. This sort of brutal violence against a child should prepare you for the brutality to follow, which not only has Ovi constantly in the line of danger, but also inserts other kids into the action, including child soldiers.

If you get queasy at the thought of violence involving children, perhaps leave Extraction off your Netflix watchlist. The film is certainly a bit exploitative of its gritty content. As well, there’s more than a whiff of a white saviour complex to Tyler, who becomes so fixated on saving Ovi that he turns his back on his team and risks his life to save him. It’s hard not to read some political meaning into Hemsworth’s tall white adonis saving the weak brown child from other predatory brown people, but most action films are rife with crude political messages that justify violence and guns and military action and so forth. Thus, if you can stomach the idea of a film with a hero who mows down dozens upon dozens of villains in gruesome ways—which makes up the majority of Extraction’s 117-minute runtime—then you’ve already accepted a political premise. Why quibble over degrees of actions that would probably all repel you in real life?

Setting aside the political implications of the film, which are no different than most any action film (including the ones of the Marvel Cinematic Universe directed by this film’s producers, Joe and Anthony Russo), the film is notable purely for the intensity and clever staging of its action. Either be first or be loudest, and while Extraction doesn’t have the innovation of a John Wick, it does match its intensity, with constant knife fights, shootouts, and car chases through the winding streets of Dhaka. 

The aforementioned one-shot action scene epitomizes this breed of action intensity. It’s the film’s main selling point, as it consists of several car chases, foot chases, fist fights, and shootouts, all cleverly edited to look like one continuous take. For astute viewers, it achieves something similar to the effect of 1917 from last year, although on a smaller scale, where you’re mostly impressed by all the behind-the-scenes effort that went into pulling off such an intense sequence. Of course, this is less problematic in an action film than it is in a drama because being impressed with the stunts (and being aware of the performers behind the stunts) is hardly a strike against an action film’s impact. If anything, the death-defying stunts present in films like Police Story (1985) or Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) only add to the film’s appeal.

Any scenes without action in Extraction alternate between boring and grisly. A moment of respite in the home of an old ally played by David Harbour digs into Tyler’s psychological motivation, but it should’ve been cut at the script phase because it reduces all subtext about Tyler into text. Other scenes involving the villain Asif are shocking in their violence towards innocents—an infamous moment has one of his henchmen throw a child off a roof while questioning some witnesses. From these moments, you can tell that Hargrave and the Russos (Joe Russo is credited with the screenplay) aren’t much for finesse.

But these dramatic moments are short-lived in Extraction. It never lingers too long on Tyler’s perfunctory trauma or the moral depravity of its villains before turning back to some spectacular action sequence involving Hemsworth fighting off several men with a rake, or, perhaps most impressively, disarming a group of child soldiers without killing them. These scenes offer the sort of cleverly staged and executed action sequences that are in short supply these days, especially as the filmmaking of big-budget movies grows to resemble the style of television pilots with their reliance on flat, medium-wide shots and too much editing coverage in individual scenes. Extraction is just as humourless and imperialistic as most modern American action movies, but at least it has good action. That alone makes it a step above the rest.

6 out of 10

Extraction (2020, USA)

Directed by Sam Hargrave, written by Joe Russo, based on a story by Ande Parks, Joe Russo, and Anthony Russo, based on Ciudad by Ande Parks, Joe Russo, and Fernando León González; starring Chris Hemsworth, Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda, Golshifteh Farahani, Pankaj Tripathi, David Harbour.

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