- UK release: April 2020 (Netflix)
- Director: Sam Hargrave · Writer: Joe Russo
- Studio / distributor: AGBO; TGIM Films; Netflix
- Genre: Action thriller / rescue mission · Runtime: 117 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Chris Hemsworth (Rush, Thor) as Tyler Rake; Randeep Hooda (Highway) as Saju; Golshifteh Farahani (Paterson) as Nik Khan; Rudhraksh Jaiswal as Ovi Mahajan Jr.
- IMDb: 6.8 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 67% critics / 70% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Sam Hargrave has spent years falling off things and choreographing other people falling off things, doubling and coordinating stunts on the big Marvel pictures, and Extraction is his move out of the harness and into the director’s chair. That pedigree tells you most of what you need to know about where the film puts its money. It arrives on Netflix in late April 2020, with cinemas shut and a captive audience at home, carrying the AGBO logo of Joe and Anthony Russo, who wrote and produced it, and the not-inconsiderable advantage of Chris Hemsworth deciding he wants to be in an action film that has nothing to do with a hammer.
The setup
Tyler Rake is a black-market mercenary, the kind who takes the jobs nobody sane would, and the job here is a retrieval. The teenage son of an imprisoned Indian crime lord has been snatched by a rival drug baron and is being held in Dhaka, a city the film treats as one continuous trap. Rake goes in to get the boy out. That is the whole brief, and the film is honest about it being the whole brief: a man, a child, and a long way to the river with everyone in the city wanting them dead.
What complicates the clean exit is that nobody in this world is paying for loyalty. The men who hired Rake have their own arithmetic, the boy’s father has his own enforcer working the same streets, and the local kingpin owns the police as well as the soldiers. The grief Rake carries is sketched rather than explored, but it gives Hemsworth something to play under the violence, and it sets up the one relationship the film actually cares about, between the burnt-out professional and the frightened kid he is supposed to deliver like a parcel.
The cast
Hemsworth is the reason this works as well as it does. Stripped of the Asgard wisecracks, he plays Rake as a man running on fumes and muscle memory, and he commits physically in a way that reads on screen as genuine effort rather than choreography. He is convincing as someone who is very good at a job he no longer wants. Randeep Hooda, as the father’s own protector Saju, is the film’s best surprise, a coiled, watchful presence who is more than a match for Rake and gives the middle stretch a real antagonist rather than another interchangeable gunman. Golshifteh Farahani brings a flinty competence to Nik Khan, the handler running the operation from a distance, and Rudhraksh Jaiswal, as the boy Ovi, has the harder task of being a passenger the audience still roots for, which he manages without tipping into the precocious. The characterisation is thin across the board, and the film knows it; what it asks of the cast is presence and conviction, and it gets both.
The craft
The craft is where Extraction earns its keep. Hargrave shoots action with the eye of someone who has lived inside it, and the centrepiece is a sustained chase and fight, staged to look like a single unbroken take, that runs through cars, a stairwell and an apartment building and barely lets you breathe. Whether or not every join is invisible matters less than the effect, which is genuine momentum and a clear sense of geography, the thing so much modern action throws away in the cutting room. Newton Thomas Sigel’s camera stays close and mobile without descending into the shaky incoherence the genre has spent fifteen years apologising for. The Dhaka of the film is all heat, dust and concrete, a city that feels like a pressure cooker, and the Henry Jackman and Alex Belcher score keeps the pulse up without drowning the quieter beats. It is brutal, grounded and clearly choreographed, and it is the work of people who care about the difference between an action scene you can follow and one you simply endure.
How it stacks up
The lineage is easy to read. The grim professional fetching a child out of a hostile city is Man on Fire with the sentiment dialled down, and the wall-to-wall close-quarters carnage owes an obvious debt to The Raid and to the John Wick films, which between them reset the bar for what screen gunplay and hand-to-hand should look like. Extraction does not have John Wick’s mythology or The Raid’s lean perfection, and it is nowhere near as interested in its own world as either. What it has is that oner, and a leading man willing to be thrown around for it. Set beside something like 13 Hours, it is less interested in the politics of where it is than in the next obstacle between the hero and the exit, which is both its limitation and, honestly, its appeal.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed mixed but mostly warm, around two-thirds positive, and the split is predictable: near-unanimous praise for the staging and for Hemsworth’s commitment, and a recurring complaint that the story and the characters are too thin to carry the runtime. Audiences are a touch kinder, which fits a film built to be devoured on a sofa rather than dissected. I am closer to the audience here. The thin script is a fair charge, but it is the wrong thing to weigh a film like this on. Judge it as a piece of action staging, which is what it sets out to be, and the complaints get a lot quieter.
Verdict
Extraction is not a deep film and never pretends to be. The plot is a straight line, the emotional backstory is thin, and you will not be quoting the dialogue. None of that stops it being one of the most satisfying pure action films of the year. It moves, it stages its set pieces with real skill and clarity, and it gives Hemsworth a part that uses his physicality instead of his charm. For a streaming release dropped in the middle of a locked-down spring, it punches well above the usual algorithm-filler weight, and the central chase alone is worth the visit. I will happily watch that sequence again, which for this kind of film is the test that matters. 8⁄10.
Availability: Streaming on Netflix now, worldwide, from 24 April 2020.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the open ending paid off in Extraction 2 (2023), which reunited Hargrave and Hemsworth and built its own showcase oner around a prison break and a train, comfortably topping the first film for sheer logistical ambition. The original has settled in as one of Netflix’s most-watched original films and the launch of a genuine franchise. It remains on Netflix.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for violence, injury detail, language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The film’s full category-by-category BBFC Content Advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; the rating and the short consumer advice line above are taken from the BBFC’s classification of the film, and the summary below is drawn from the published parental and content guidance rather than quoted verbatim from the BBFC.
Violence and injury detail: Strong, sustained and bloody action violence runs throughout, including shootings at close range, stabbings, and brutal hand-to-hand fighting, with visible wounds, blood and injury detail. There is violence involving a child and other distressing moments.
Language: Frequent strong language (‘fk’, ‘motherf**r’) alongside milder terms.
Drugs: There is sight of drug use.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk); content summary informed by the BBFC consumer advice and published parental guidance.
