2 out of 5

Directed by: Sam Hargrave

I like action movies. I think I like classic, Commando-era action movies, so I think I should be okay with flicks that harken back to one-man-army flicks, where the bad guys are swarms of balaclavaed, gun-toting nobodies who all die via the never-runs-out ammo of the lead, and some evil villain chortles from a rooftop somewhere, and easy narrative arcs where a mercenary – here played by Chris Hemsworth – becomes a mercenary with a heart of gold, since his quarry (Rudhraksh Jaiswal, playing the held-for-ransom son of a drug lord) causes his thoughts to fuzzy flashback to his ‘I lost ’em long ago’ family, but… maybe those movies, when made now, in an action-elevated, post-Raid, post-John Wick world, where we’ve started to question the senseless slaughter of something like the Uncharted games (whose lead Nathan Drake has quite a similar name to Chris’ “Tyler Rake,” jesus christ…), maybe you can’t just call it a throwback and have an extra long oner as a centerpiece and call it a day? Maybe there should be more of a movie there?

Then again, those flicks I just namechecked I mostly enjoyed, and I love the Uncharted series, narrative dissonance or not, but Sam Hargrave’s Extraction rarely clicked for me. It’s initial introduction to Rake, as he and his team are hired on by the aforementioned drug lord to rescue kid Ovi (Jaiswal) from drug lord B, Amir (Priyanshu Painyuli) – that did work, though that’s mostly before the action and story really kick in. We get an acceptable rescue sequence, that leans towards Raid’s violence, but notably without Gareth Edwards sense of scene composition, stunt coordinator-turned director Hargrave trying to carve out his own style with moderate success – closeup, cleanly shot, and inventive without being overly flashy or grisly – but it’s during the escape from Dhaki, Bangladesh to wherever that the film introduces its main narrative wrinkle… and never quite deals with fully explaining it. That wrinkle is Saju (Randeep Hooda), essentially another ‘extractor’ working for Ovi’s pop, thus setting up an interesting conflict for Rake – handing over the kid for no payment, or essentially rekidnapping the kid himself and continuing on with the original pay-for-return plan. Interesting! Probably worth some dialogue, to sift out the ramifications of that! Or not, and you can just brush any concept of that away and sub in buddy comedy snips between Rake and Ovi while the movie drops its, like, 20+ minute faux-one shot chase sequence at you.

You’ve likely heard of this scene regarding discussions of the movie, or maybe seen a few clips. I’m here to be a spoilsport: not to discredit the immense skill in planning out and editing this sequence together, it is forced as fuck, and goes on for much, much too long without any real need to do so beyond being showy. The relative limitation of Hargrave’s action style – or perhaps his caution in trying not to be a copycat – comes out here, as there’s nothing especially mindblowing in the beat-by-beats, except that it keeps going. Rake’s style is up close throws and quick gunshots (more Wick-y there, I suppose), but we’re stuck to very samey looking hallways and rooms, and near literally the Uncharted playbook of lookalike bad guys, differing only by which guns they carry, and how many bullets they can absorb. There are downbeats between fights or driving sections that an editor would strip out, if not for the need to make it look like one-shot; it’s not breathless like such scenes can be, rather tiresome, perhaps in part because Rake proves to be a tireless superhero, and this is very much where you start to notice that he’s just mowing down dozens and dozens of soldiers, and yet, the movie has taken a few seconds to show us Saju’s family… It’s such a sloppy combination of balls-out action and attempted “serious” storytelling, but without the kind of cheeseball ignorance of classic actioners, that I could neither get too amped up by the choreography and stunts – limitations notwithstanding – or try to lean in to the characters and plot.

The mercenary-with-a-heart-of-gold turn is handled with equal dullness, and the final showdown sequence ratcheted up my lack of immersion with a missing sense of geography – snipers positioned at various points, Rake and Sanju and Ovi at different points on the bridge, and it all felt too vaguely conceived.

Which is probably the summary statement: Extraction, on a whole, is vaguely conceived. As a throwback actioner; as a modern, Joe Russo-penned “serious” actioner; as a stunt spectacle; as a story. I realize I’ve had almost exclusively negative things to say, but there are positives: while Hargraves’ directorship look and feel may still be being carved out, it’s not amateurish by any means, and working with DP Newton Thomas Sigel, nothing in frame is bad, at all – I can definitely see future works being quite compelling. And the performances are strong, especially Jaiswal, with the generally thankless tag-along kid role. But since we’re plagued with that cloudiness from a conceptual stage, it lingers over everything, and makes a constantly in-motion, gun-firing, one-shotted movie very, very bland.