Extraction 2 Is Another Stale Brick In The Streaming Wall

WHEN did Hollywood actioners become so…boring? That’s not a rhetorical question. The answer: Since the Russo Brothers started blowing things up on screen. Forget the Marvel films, my beef is with titles like The Gray Man, Citadel, Extraction and now Extraction 2. These are so singularly forgettable — so consistently interchangeable — that I’m starting to miss Michael Bay’s monopoly over the Dumb Action Movie. There were times during this big-budget Netflix sequel that I actually lost interest *mid-way* through an action set piece. I normally yawn before or after such moments — you know, during the clunky set-ups and half-baked story-building — but here my yawns coincided with burning helicopters, incompetent bullets, bone-crunching combat, rogue fires and, believe it or not, a 21-minute one-take action scene. It’s not that the choreography isn’t good. It is (mostly), and props to the performers and technical teams; the problem is one of overkill. When everything is crazy, nothing is crazy anymore.

Extraction 2 takes off from the end of the first film, where macho mercenary Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) gets shot and falls off a bridge in Dhaka after completing his mission. Unfortunately for Mad Max: Fury Road and John Wick fans, Rake survives — barely. He ends up in a hospital for months, wants to die, but ultimately retires to a remote Siberian cabin, thanks to the care and generosity of striking colleague Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) and her brother Yaz (Adam Bessa). Rake is all broken and bruised, sampling a normie-secluded life in the woods, until a mysterious agent (Idris Elba) shows up to offer him a for-legends-only job. Rake accepts it once he realises that the mission hits close to home — his ex-wife’s sister needs to be extracted along with her two kids from a Georgian prison, where she has been living with her powerful-gangster husband. It’s a marital spat, basically, where the wife wants to leave her husband and their cramped arrangement because she’s afraid that her kids will never see sunlight again. The man’s brother — a sinister product of the nation’s war-torn history — practically runs the country. So there’s that hurdle.

Rake gathers Nik and the team to raid the place in a 21-minute-long shot that features the violent prison-break, a car chase through the woods and a speeding train’s face-off with airborne enemies. (Notice how casually I describe the sequence? Ho hum). The rest of the film revolves around Rake’s struggle to keep the woman and her kids (especially that annoying teenaged son) safe, and dodging the laws of physics and biology while finding closure for his own tragic backstory (Is “Mercenary” the new synonym for estranged wife and dead son?). There are two more extensive set pieces in the film — a brawl and shootout on a Vienna skyscraper, and a bit of everything at an old church. The end suggests that there will be many, many more Extraction movies, simply because the makers assume that slick action on streaming platforms is the cheerful antidote to Tom Cruise and Christopher Nolan’s big-screen dominance.

It’s not surprising that Extraction 2 has snapped back into default mode (East Europe) after seducing South Asian audiences with its first instalment. It’s a smart commercial decision: To engage the most densely populated area on the planet by using a few Bollywood actors, before heading back into the non-sepia-tinged wilderness of the West. The result: Indian fans in particular stay under the illusion that this is a ‘homegrown’ franchise, hyping up every part purely on the basis of second-hand association. I like Chris Hemsworth as much as an Avenger can be liked, but it’s hard to watch Rake and not wonder why he looks like Thor in a deep funk after quitting the superhero game. His backstory reveals that he was a Special Ops guy who left for an Afghanistan stint when his son was dying of cancer — but who’s to tell the viewer he wasn’t sneaking off to assist the Russo Brothers in their quest to single-handedly nuke the modern superhero genre? That mythical aura is difficult to shake off for someone like Hemsworth, particularly when he plays these jaded-rogue-soldier roles who’re haunted by the self-seriousness of the narrative they’re trapped in.

Also Read: Citadel Uses Its Licence to Kill (Us With Boredom) 

Coming back to the anatomy of these action dramas, let me be more specific. In an age where ChatGPT is threatening to put half the directors out to pasture, envelope-pushing technological feats can no longer be the selling points of a franchise. The single-take sequences, for instance, used to mean something in movies like Children of Men and Birdman — you marvelled at the audacity of the engineering as much as the urgency of the plot. That’s not a novelty anymore, though, because nearly every production worth its salt is designing a breath-taking one-shot sequence as we speak. It’s not as exclusive to see any more, too, because we’ve reached a point where visual effects can will cities and human beings into existence out of thin air. (I’m such an introvert that if a stranger approaches me to make conversation, my first thought is: “Is he/she a hologram?” — hologram being the keyword here). The scene in this film is impressive, of course, but it won’t be spoken of in the same breath as the aforementioned titles.

It’s a crowded field now, and if so many are doing it, maybe “it” isn’t so special anymore. The context is what must elevate these gimmicks, and Extraction 2 is the sort of film that shamelessly counts on the gimmick to be taken seriously. Otherwise it’s just another supersoldier thriller where public property becomes cool collateral damage (The cops show up in the end, but where were they when hero and villain and gang were threatening to bring down a whole skyscraper in a famous European city?). Not to mention the very human trait of getting conditioned to the carefully composed noise and bloodshed, which is unimaginative precisely because it tries so hard to be imaginative. It’s a business-as-usual approach to action storytelling — oddly joyless and constrained by the tropes of the OTT hit factory. There’s no real script to speak of, and more importantly, there’s no space for the film to breathe and be anything more than the sum of its flashy parts. Like what if Tyler Rake smiles by mistake? Is it too much to ask for? But the stakes are high, you see. If he smiles or dares to express any emotions other than no emotions, the multiverse-of-mediocrity would come crashing down — and not even the ageing Avengers can save it.

Stream it now.