Extraction

 I’ve been avoiding Extraction for a while, mainly based on a terrible trailer and it being a Netflix original. Seeing some of the action from the sequel got me curious, though, so… here we are! TLDR: It’s a pretty fun, sometimes great action movie brought down by some truly dire writing.

 Things kick off with in media res, with Caine McExtraction (Chris Hemsworth) stuck in the middle of a shootout in a bridge. It’s… not a great scene, to be honest – gritty, but not much happens and the action isn’t very engaging – and then it cuts to “2 days earlier”. A bit pointless, but ok, sure. Not feeling confident about the script.

 Our protagonist, who’s actually called Tyler Rake (say it out loud! It’s one of those comic-book names that’s just fun to enunciate) is your standard sad-sack, traumatized soldier with a side of a death wish (we know this because he pulls a suicidal stunt on a whim. In case you didn’t get the very obvious message, one scene later his handler (the great Goldshifteh Farahani, who gets next to nothing to do here) just states it out loud. Because that’s the level of scriptwriting we’re dealing with here; Living down to that trailer already.

 Tyler’s a mercenary, and his mission, should he choose to accept it, is to rescue Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), an imprisoned Indian kingpin’s son from a rival kingpin in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The problem? The kidnapper pretty much runs the city, including a heavy militarized police force. Also – the imprisoned kingpin has all his assets frozen, so he can’t pay the mercenary outfit the extraction fee; He instead sends his first in command, Saju (a very cool Randeep Hooda) to kill the mercs and snatch the kid.

 The movie peaks early on with some truly great action – the rescue has some cool hand to hand combat, both armed and unarmed, and some awesome stunts; the filming is a little choppy but crystal clear and immediate, and there are a lot of cool moves and painful-looking falls. But the surprising thing is that it keeps expanding in scope as Tyler and Ovi make their way through the vicinity trying to escape from goons and cops and Saju – there’s a ton of gunplay, knife fights (in a street where cars just won’t break), a very fun car chase… the works. And it’s long! About twenty-five minutes, with some asides, and a lot of it strung together into a (pretty well done) faux-one take.
 At the end it leaves our protagonists stuck in hostile territory, with no means of extraction.

 From there on we get mediocre drama – some boring, predictable business with a fellow merc (David Harbour), a fun fight against a bunch of kids, trite bonding stuff. It all ends with another appropriately long fight on a bridge which I unfortunately didn’t think was nearly as good as some of the earlier stuff, despite the expanded scope. Some dodgy explosion CGI and the only available enemies being faceless mooks (and a tertiary character promoted to sniper) might have something to do with that.
 Still fun enough, though.

 The main problem here is a script that seems to understand the surface elements that make for a good action movie, but completely fails in developing them to… well, basically to any degree; it’s all skin deep, set dressing. Basic to a fault, never developing its threadbare themes into anything even remotely interesting; Just borrowing shit from better movies to give it the desired texture without any interest in saying something or enhancing the action.
 There’s a place for that sort of thing – as Polite Society accurately pointed out, tropes are tropes for a reason; But the uninspired way everything is recycled here, while still dotting its I’s and crossing its Ts to show that the writers have attended some screenwriting classes, is kind of off-putting.
 Given all this shit, it didn’t surprise me to find out it’s written by the Russo brothers (along with the author of the source comic, Ande Parks, but I wouldn’t hold it against him). This is very much of a piece with everything of their output as writers I’ve seen; These folks just completely suck at storytelling.

 (Let me state for the record that I somehow completely missed the script was theirs until the end credits! I thought they just produced.)

 The actors do wonders with the shitty lines they’re given. Hemsworth is basically a charisma golem, and he could play this soulful beefcake in a coma and still make it compelling. Rudhraksh Jaiswal is asked to do a lot more as the kidnappee and succeeds admirably, even when asked to provide some appropriately water-based trite wisdom. Randeep Hooda makes the biggest impression, though, delivering a very cool, relatable badass antagonist.
 Sam Hargrave, a veteran stuntman and stunt/fight coordinator, does pretty well directing his first full length film – and that's putting it mildly; Can’t think of that many established directors who could have pulled off that mid-movie action scene as well as he did.

 For all my railing against the script – and I could go on, from the pointless, hacky gesture at the end to the bad guy following the action on binoculars from miles away as if it was a football match (which to be honest is the more fun type of dumb I like in this sort of thing!) …in the end it’s mostly harmless and provides the requisite excuses for a bunch of people to get shot up good. Don't need to forgive something that's this easily forgotten. Thankfully everything else comes through; Can’t wait to see what Hargrave does to top it in the sequel.