Released: 16th June
Seen: 26th June
In the year of our lord 2020, Netflix released something that it doesn’t get to release often… a hit film that people actually watched. That film was Extraction, a powerhouse action flick directed by the stunt coordinator for such films as Avengers: Endgame and the Hunger Games Trilogy, which meant that it was basically designed from the ground up to deliver intense high-caliber action sequences with a somewhat interesting story to hold everything together. At the time the film managed to get 99 million viewers in the first month, it’s currently the 7th most viewed original film on the platform (at least as far as we know because Netflix is cagey about releasing its viewer data) – obviously Netflix was going to make a sequel to one of their biggest hits and so they brought back a few of the original cast, the original director and writing team and said “Go do that again” and sure enough, they went and did it again.
Extraction 2 picks up not long after the first one, with our main hero Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) going through a brutal recovery after his last mission left him almost dead. His plan now is to basically retire and leave his old life behind since he figures he probably couldn’t pull off the whole “not dying’ trick again and doesn’t want to risk it. That is until he learns that his ex-wife’s sister Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili) and her two children Sandro (Andro Japaridze) and Nina (Miriami and Marta Kovziashvili) are locked in a prison in Georgia along with Ketevan’s abusive husband Davit (Tornike Bziava). Now that family is involved, Tyler and his team are back in the game and the mission is to rescue Ketevan, Sandro and Nina from the prison and keep them safe from the abusive Davit and his brother Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani). Of course, this mission will be incredibly difficult and involve a lot of shooting and stabbing but hey, that’s what made this movie worth making in the first place.
If you enjoyed Extraction then I have good news, Extraction 2 is basically the same movie but more. More blood, more gore, carnage candy. More explosions, more expensive-looking buildings taking impossible amounts of damage, more times Chris Hemsworth somehow avoids being shot multiple times despite being the biggest physical mass on screen, just more of everything. The crown jewel of this ethos that can be boiled down to “Please sir, I want some more” is the long take fight scene that clearly looked at the 11-minute-long one-shot fight scene from the first Extraction movie and decided to almost double it with a 21-minute one-shot scene that goes over multiple locations and includes planes, trains and automobiles… ok technically helicopters but the reference needed to be made.
That 21-minute-long set piece is emblematic of the reason that Extraction 2 exists, namely the former stunt coordinator turned director wants to show off just how goddamn talented stunt people are by just throwing everything he has in one glorious shot. It’s a marvel of human agility and planning that they could put this shot in Extraction 2 and it somehow actually works, every single punch is viscerally felt, every swing of a shovel or swipe of a shiv feels dangerous to everyone around and oh boy, can you tell that the stunt people were living their best lives making this. It’s really a testament to these insane people who put their bodies and lives on the line and make things look cool, they justify the entire film’s existence on their own.
Fortunately, there is some stuff beyond the big explosions and punching to make Extraction 2 somewhat worthwhile, it’s further proof that Chris Hemsworth is actually a pretty good action hero lead and maybe he should be doing more of that instead of stuff like Spiderhead because he manages to make a compelling lead who we root for even while watching him shoot and stab at anything that needs either shooting or stabbing (sometimes both, because sometimes people need both). He even makes you care about all the people around him, you might not remember their names or much about their characters beyond “Good person doing the shooting” and “Bad person doing the shooting” but you will care about them because Tyler Rake cares about them, which is something.
The problem with Extraction 2 is one that’s probably not going to be seen until the next film in the Extraction franchise, which is that there are only so many ways to make things explode before it becomes repetitive. Hell, that kind of ends up happening with Extraction 2 even when it tries to throw in an emotional curveball revolving around Sandro and his loyalty to his father, it’s a curveball that’s just going to lead to more explosions and shooting, and that happens in the second half of the film… the first half having the epic 20-minute single shot that is so insanely impressive that everything afterward feels like a letdown.
Sure, the big skyscraper battle looks cool but I just watched Extraction 2 run a camera person through a prison, onto a highway and then onto a train without yelling cut which is kind of hard to top. How the hell will they top this next time? Have a 47-minute-long one-take that takes place in a digital recreation of the viewer’s street in real-time? The diminishing returns feel like they’re seconds away from setting in and it makes the final act of the film just that much less interesting because it has to follow an absolute barn burner of an opening. By the time Extraction 2 ends, it basically would need to set off a nuke in order to top itself but it can’t do that because then there’d be no third film where Tyler Rake will undoubtedly do all this all over again.
Extraction 2 is Extraction but just a little extra… Extra2tion 2? It’s just more of what made the first film enjoyable but without the novelty factor. It’s not treading new ground, it’s just repeating what it did before but a little louder this time. It’s still fun, still got enough to make action fans happy and it’s undeniable how impressive that 20+ minute single shot scene is as a feat of cinematography alone (I want the editor to tell me explicitly where they hid all of the cuts because there have to be so many of them) but there’s nothing new here to really bring more people in. Did you like Extraction? Cool, here’s more Extraction for you, you can’t really complain that it’s serving you the exact thing you expect it to… let’s see how long they can do that for.
Movie Meister Reviews 