Who would have thought that the action genre, long declared dead owing to post-CGI universalism, institutionalised by Marvel, would be somewhat revived by a streaming service. Coincidentally, this act of redemption has been executed by someone who has worked with Marvel, and transported its cinema’s queer lack of adrenaline to a unlikely franchise monster on a much smaller screen. Extraction 2, directed by former stuntman Sam Hargrave is a jaw-dropping sequel to the first which released in 2020. In this second film, the stakes are greater, the action wilder and the set-pieces a thing of audacious, at times anxious, beauty. Not since the days of James Cameron (as the Action Director) has a film wielded its axe of brute lore with such comprehensive verve. Stunning, evocative and profoundly mean, Extraction 2 is a magisterially choreographed opera of violence.
We continue in this second instalment to follow Tyler, played by Chris Hemsworth, recovering from the bruising climax of the first film. Back on his feet, he is reluctantly thrust into another job by Idris Elba, appearing here as a typically smooth-talking fixer of sorts. Tyler is sent in to rescue a family from a Georgian prison. In a sly, but expected twist teased from the off, this rescue mission then becomes a defensive position that the protagonist and his small team of specialists must hold for the rest of the film. It’s a straightforward plot that drives a nefarious Georgian gangster against Tyler’s quiet but cocky murdering machine. It’s also a film that takes place in three different acts — the rescue, the defence, and, at last, a form of cathartic vengeance. Interestingly, the sequences that anchor each, decreases in scale suggesting a tightening of the narrative noose around Tyler’s assured, metallic self. The emotional stakes become graver as the battle becomes more personal. It’s a trope that most great action films have used.
The first act is headlined by a single-take shot that ends on a moving train, it quite simply, blows the lid off of the film. It’s breath-taking to say the least, boasting a kind of dynamism that is quite simply rare in today’s CGI-padded silos of make-believe. Helicopters crash, men lose their heads and countless bullets leave their metallic hosts with wrenching earnestness. You’d think Hargrave couldn’t possibly better it, at least not in terms of the ferocity and pace, but an attack on a high-rise in Vienna, as the second act, is just as gripping if not better. There is a sequence where Tyler fights, while perched on the edge of a glass ceiling and it will probably make you gasp for breath. Hargrave’s vision, especially his understanding of tactile environments adds suavity to the brute force of the machinery in use.
What makes Extraction so unique is that unlike most action films, here usually the bad guys speak the most. Tyler, in comparison, deals in two-liners, rarely exposing himself to the critical armoury of emotional readers. He is broken on the inside, but he isn’t quite allowed the verbosity of a John McClane or the cheesiness of a Will Smith. He is instead, broody, matter-of-fact and christened in the image of a director who believes, action could and probably should speak louder than words. To which effect, Tyler’s relapse into existentialism, his migration from one job to the other is often without effect or animation. He quite simply picks up his gear, moves on to the next job — much like a stuntman. In a scene where he has to rendezvous with his antagonist he refuses to even consider a peaceful reconciliation. “I’m not coming to negotiate,” he says with the finality of a man who doesn’t deal in half measures or second thoughts.
Hargrave’s directorial debut — the first part — was a hair-raising teaser of things to come. The second installment of this impeccably tight franchise upends conventional wisdom about the broader trajectory of action films. Most of our action is now put together by technical witchcraft, blurred by the indistinctiveness of computer-generated imagery, and distilled with the help of tech whimsy. A punch, a bullet emerging from a gun, the sight of a grenade hitting the keg of human composure, all of these things seem to have been wiped from memory by the wizardry of futuristic laser guns and world-bending superpowers. There is, of course, a baffling inertness to Extraction as well, the irrationality of Tyler’s many lives, his cocksure, at times bullish insistence on taking on armies, all by himself. But you don’t mind it because when Extraction kicks the bucket it doesn’t just clobber it over the ledge, but load it with dynamite, send it to the sky and watch it perish mid-air. It’s a tad exaggerated and, maybe, even inane at times, but my god is it thrilling, in the purest, most visceral of ways. The way action films were supposed to be like but unfortunately aren’t any more.
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