2020’s Netflix film ‘Extraction’ was one of the biggest hits in a cinematic year ripped to shreds thanks to the pandemic.
Chris Hemsworth has been in some awful films, while his name has been attached to big projects such as ‘Thor’, ‘Men in Black’, and ‘Ghostbusters (2016)’; the quality of those films are awful. The last Thor film was so despised by critics and audiences alike, Hemsworth has openly debated whether to either return to the Thor franchise.
The reason why ‘Extraction’ was such a great change of pace is that it proved he does have the ability to be a credible action star when given the right material. Hemsworth starred as Tyler Rake, a black-market mercenary who is recruited to travel to the criminal underbelly of Bangladesh and rescue the son of India’s biggest drug lord, Ovi Mahajan Sr. The first movie provided everything that the audience wanted: a good protagonist, a good antagonist, and balls-to-the-wall action.
Extraction 2 is Chris Hemsworth defining moment to see whether the first movie was a fluke or if he actually had a legitimate franchise outside of the MCU to get in with. While everyone was excited about Chris Hemsworth, everyone forgot about the elephant in the room: Netflix.
‘Extraction 2’ takes place moments after the events of the last film. After barely surviving his previous mission, Tyler Rake disappears to a cabin in Austria to heal from his injuries. He gets approached by a stranger offering him his next mission to rescue his ex-wife Mia’s sister Ketevan and her two children Sandro and Nina, who are currently imprisoned along with her gangster husband Davit Radiani at Tkachiri prison in Georgia.
After getting a few weeks to train, Rake is back on the job extracting a family out of a hostile Georgian prison however getting out of the prison is the easy part. Getting the family out of the country and out of the hands of a murderous warlord will take more might than Rake can offer.
This should have been the stamp on Chris Hemsworth’s career as an action star but instead, Netflix used it as an opportunity to create spin-offs and sequels to characters that they wanted to push. Netflix subverts everything that was good about the first movie by taking the concept of a man going up against an entire nation’s underbelly and turns it into a showcase of other characters.
Golshifteh Farahani plays Nik Kahn, a mercenary and partner of Tyler. Her character was there to provide support to Rake as he made his last-ditch effort to escape the country. In this film, she is given equal shine to Chris’s character in the hopes that she can get a rub that will lead to Netflix giving her her own spinoff film in the future.
She isn’t the only one Netflix adds to the mix, Adam Bessa plays the brother of Nik who also gets equal footing with the rest of the characters. What this does is take the franchise from being a Resident Evil 4-style escort Mission and turns into a Resident Evil 6-style escort mission.
Netflix knew they had something special with the first movie so instead of trying to ride out that wave and establishing a firm fan base with a new franchise, the film uses this movie to create yet another Cinematic Universe rather than trusting Hemsworth as the face of the franchise.
There are parts in the movie where you forget that Hemsworth is in the film as stretches of the action happen without him. The movie sacrifices any coherent story to engage the audience in hopes that the stunt choreography will carry them to the finish line.
The media has made a big deal about the fact that there’s a 21 minute action one shot. While the sequence is certainly impressive, the film didn’t have any other ideas to fill its 2-hour run time. Extraction 2 strips away all of the elements of the first one that made it hit. Stripping away it’s heart and soul and replaces it with generic action.
‘Extraction 2’ is a film crafted for mindless audiences. Don’t bother waiting another 3 years for Extraction 3 to come out, just watch the first movie and realize it is as good as it’s going to get.
2/5
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