After being shot in the chest, falling off a flyover and being declared clinically dead for over nine months, one would expect Tyler Rake (played by a hunkier Chris Hemsworth) to sit back, relax and reflect on the events of last year — perhaps, go to therapy? Bollocks. All it takes is an Idris Elba in a thick British accent to convince Rake to pack his machine guns and go straight to a Georgia prison to extract the wife and kids of a Nagazi leader, Davit. What follows is 21 minutes of the much-hyped action sequence which was shot in one take. It begins in a prison as Rake rescues the kids, defends himself from a mob of prisoners, and makes his way to a train which eventually derails and crashes.
The meticulously crafted sequence more than lives up to the hype; there are sudden grenade explosions, knife attacks, burnt helicopters, and a lot of blood and gore. While the next two acts of the film are comparatively tamer and not as high on adrenaline, Extraction 2 and Chris Hemsworth deliver what they promised — two hours of maddening action.
Writers Russo brothers also comment on the perils of a traumatic childhood and how it can have lasting ramifications. There is also a sub-plot on how religion is radicalising men which, at least partially, falls on its face. But that’s the thing about the Extraction franchise — it is not set out to offer social commentary. The Russo brothers and director Sam Hargrave know their target audience and are in no way trying to sound too cerebral. That, perhaps, is the franchise’s biggest win — it is self-aware and unapologetically catering to those who’d much rather watch an exhilarating train sequence than a commentary on religion or toxic masculinity, even though these themes are present in the film.
With Extraction 2, Chris Hemsworth seems to have cemented his place firmly as an action hero who carries a franchise on his back — think Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible series, Keanu Reeves’s John Wick, Matt Damon’s Bourne series, Jason Stathum’s Transporter franchise or Liam Neeson’s Taken films. This also warrants a question — why are action film franchises suddenly popular again?
Oversaturation of action films
Somewhere in the late aughts and early 2010s, audiences seemed to have lost the appetite for action films. This reflected in not just the box-office numbers but also in the reviews and IMDb ratings. Why did this happen? Why didn’t action films rekindle the same curiosity as a Die Hard series, with Bruce Willis, did back in the ’90s? Or, was there an "action film fatigue" setting in, just like the ongoing superhero fatigue due to repetitive Marvel films? Whatever be the case, it was clear that the cinema goers required a different film genre to satiate their palette, at least for a while. There are only so many times you can see a car being flipped, or a hyper-masculine hero with a saviour complex and overbearing fatherly instincts rescue women from the clutches of bad guys.
Back home in India, things weren’t too different. After the mega-success of the Dhoom franchise in late aughts, most action films in the 2010s didn’t perform the way one expected. Director Rohit Shetty was often called out for unrealistic choreography of the action scenes in his films, where cars would fly and planes would do things which weren’t possible as per laws of Physics.
There was a change needed. To revive the dead action spy franchise, one had to experiment and dare to break the stereotypes associated with the genre. Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2018) with Gal Gadot in the lead, sparked interest in viewers who, for once, wanted to see a woman to beat up the bad guys. The franchise was adored across the spectrum and it kickstarted the long overdue renaissance of action films. Back home in India, the audience was dying to see Shah Rukh Khan on the big screen. They also had an appetite for an event film after Brahmastra’s sub-par performance in 2022. Pathaan (a 2023 release) fulfilled both demands and set the cash registers ringing with a box office collection of Rs 1,000 crore.
The future of action films
Now that the appetite for action films is coming back, do they have a bright future? For starters, there is likely to be a lot of them now with Extraction 2 taking off. The old franchises are also being rebooted in addition to the spin-offs. But it is of fundamental importance that these films keep reinventing themselves instead of serving the same old car chases and plane crashes in a higher resolution. Part of the reason why Extraction 2 works well is that the one-take sequence was, perhaps, the first of its kind in an action film. Will action films show innovative reinventions and keep the viewers hooked to their screens? Only time will tell.
Extraction 2 is streaming now on Netflix.
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