Death isn’t the end—or, at least, it isn’t when there’s more money to be made.
As the most-watched original film in Netflix history, director Sam Hargraves’ 2020 blockbuster Extraction was destined for a follow-up, regardless of the fact that—SPOILER ALERT!—its gung-ho commando protagonist Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) seemingly perished at its end.
Extraction 2 is thus an inevitable act of resurrection as well as a predictable upping-the-ante sequel, steroidally amplifying everything about its predecessor, highlighted by a 21-minute single-take centerpiece (nine minutes longer than its precursor!) of unbridled action insanity. At its deadliest, it’s a feat of breathtaking cinematic showmanship on par with recent standouts The Villainess, Carter and John Wick 4—even if its tale is as threadbare as its carnage is copious.
Penned by Joe Russo (The Gray Man, Avengers: Endgame), Extraction was no great writing accomplishment; emblematic of its simplicity was the sight of hero Rake killing an adversary with an actual rake. Extraction 2 (also from Russo) doesn’t stoop to such corniness. In most respects, though, it cares little about its plot, which is just the connective tissue tethering together its three primary set pieces.
A quick prologue depicts a gravely injured Rake being fished out of a Mumbai river, rehabilitated back to health by doctors on the orders of his close comrades Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) and Yaz (Adam Bessa), and dropped off at a remote snowbound cabin to enjoy premature injured retirement. Rest and relaxation don’t suit Rake, however, so he’s happy to get off the couch and back into homicidal shape (all it takes is a little Rocky IV-esque training montage!) when a mysterious stranger (Idris Elba) shows up on his porch and offers him a new saving-kidnapped-folks job.
Rake’s assignment is to break into a Georgian prison and rescue Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili), the sister of Rake’s ex-wife Mia (Olga Kurylenko), as well as her son Sandro (Andro Jafaridze) and daughter Nina (Miriam and Marta Kovziashvili), all of whom have been forced to live behind bars by their imprisoned gangster paterfamilias Davit (Tornike Bziava). Rake accepts, and the showstopper that follows is a thing of choreographic majesty.
Recalling (if not surpassing) the intro to last year’s Athena, except with plentiful helicopters, Extraction 2 unloads its proverbial clip early, with Hargraves staging a protracted jaw-dropper that follows Rake through a preposterous gauntlet of battlefield challenges. Those include, but aren’t limited to, locating and securing his targets, fighting groups of inmates, navigating tunnels, wasting Davit in a mano-y-mano showdown, surviving an anarchic prison riot (during which his hand catches on fire from an explosion, for maximum fists-ablaze combat), engaging in a grenade-tossing car chase, slaying enemies (and felling choppers with a chain gun) on a train, and surviving a monumental crash. It’s ultra-violent excess on a mind-boggling scale.
There may be covert (and not-so-covert) digital cuts stitching together this supposed “oner,” but that hardly undercuts its formal artistry. Pondering how Hargraves’ roving handheld camera (operated by cinematographer Greg Baldi) moves impossibly between interior and exterior spaces—even squeezing between the few inches separating a speeding train and the walls of a tunnel—is part of the fun of Extraction 2’s calling card, as is the director’s ability to maintain visual lucidity through it all. Those with a weak stomach (or who are prone to motion sickness) would be wise to avoid this ride. Yet genre-hounds searching for muscular, bravura summer-movie mayhem need look no further.
Unsurprisingly, Extraction 2 never totally recovers from this opening salvo. Still, after some superfluous storytelling—with Rake completing his task, only to have Sandro foolishly betray them all out of devotion to his criminal clan—the momentum vigorously picks up in Vienna. In a high-rise building that proves to be a strategically unwise place to take refuge, Rake and company are beset by Davit’s vicious brother Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani), who wants revenge against his beloved sibling’s killer.
Zurab is a standard-issue Eastern European baddie with a cold, remorseless heart, and his minions are a similarly generic bunch. Then again, Rake is hardly Mister Personality; as embodied by Hemsworth, he’s a determined murder machine with a one-grimace-fits-all disposition. Everyone is a proto-’80s archetype, minus any (intentional or otherwise) sense of humor.
What matters in Extraction 2 is the non-stop bloodshed, and there’s plenty of it. Hargraves’ middle-section siege affords additional opportunities to witness Rake’s unparalleled gift for ending men’s lives, be it with a gun, a knife, his bare hands or gym equipment—the last of which makes hilarious sense, given the buff Hemsworth’s familiarity with such devices.
Shortly thereafter, Rake pulls off an equally impressive life-saving maneuver on a glass-paneled ceiling, further casting the film as an exercise in pure aggro imagination. The surprise comes not from its by-the-books scripting but from the sheer creativity of Hargraves’ direction, which only flags during the finale, when everyone seems too spent to stage a third massive conflict and instead falls back on a routine face-off that gives Rake another chance to redeem himself for fleeing his dying son’s bedside years earlier.
There’s no point in seriously addressing Rake’s tortured soul because it remains merely a flimsy motivating force behind his child-rescuing exploits. No matter how many anonymous villains he murders (with gruesome prejudice), he’s really a good guy, and in fact a softie to boot—just look at how he comforts little Nina in the middle of all this chaos!
So one-dimensional is Rake, and so outlandish are his exploits, that the film often resembles one very long, very involved video game cut scene, replete with some chintzy CGI effects (those helicopters look, let’s say, less than totally real). Nonetheless, it’s not, and the live-action stunts performed throughout are of a consistently muscular and invigorating variety, with every bomb landing with concussive force, and every gnarly stabbing striking with squirm-inducing sharpness.
Juiced to inhuman proportions, Extraction 2 is an attempt at creating a franchise founded on raw, unbridled, inventive macho madness. In a domestic cine-landscape marked by plentiful kid-friendly superhero sagas and few R-rated genre extravaganzas, that’s a bet it may yet win.
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