Extraction

Now that streaming services are the only way to see new movies, it will be interesting to see how that will affect things post-COVID-19. Extraction, which was released in April, was a big hit for Netflix (supposedly their highest viewed film, though they don't release numbers). I just caught up with it.

It's a so-so action picture that features many pet peeves of mine. For one thing, it is excessively violent. As I said in my review of The Old Guard (also from Netflix) I don't mind violence, but I don't like it when it looks like a video game, with the hero getting shot, run over by a truck, and dropping from a great height but is okay, but he kills his adversaries with one shot, even when they're in body armor. Can we put a moratorium on the indestructible hero?

The hero in question is played by Chris Hemsworth. He's a mercenary who is hired to retrieve a kidnapped boy in Dhaka, Bangladesh (I give the movie points for being set in a different place, although those in Dhaka don't like how it is represented). The boy is the son of an imprisoned crime lord, kidnapped by a rival (dubbed the Pablo Escobar of Dhaka). The boy's father demands that his security chief rescue him, but that man ends up hiring Hemsworth and his team, and then double-crosses them so they don't get paid. But Hemsworth, who has a dead son, doesn't care about the money and just wants to rescue the boy.

There a few quiet moments in the film, and when Hemsworth and the boy (Rudhraksh Jaiswal, in a nice performance)  bond there are some nice moments, but most of the film is carnage. Extraction also follows the trope of one man able to kill many, because his adversaries come at him one by one. If only villains could grasp the concept of attacking en masse.

Hemsworth makes a good leading man, as he has proven in his Thor movies, but I miss the humor of Thor. This film is unrelentingly grim. It was directed by Sam Hargrave, and it shows, as stunts are pretty much the highlights of the film.