Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Extraction 2’ on Netflix, a Ripping Action Flick in Which Chris Hemsworth Finds Himself in Another Doozy of a Oner

For the world’s greatest extractor, the extracting never ends. Extraction 2 (now on Netflix) continues right where 2020’s Extraction left off, with its hero Tyler Rake, played by approx. 42 percent of Chris Hemsworth’s actorly skill, falling dead into a river. But! He’s not dead, of course. It’ll take a nuke shoved deep into his sinus cavity to kill this guy, and it’s a good thing he’s not dead, because god knows, people ain’t gonna extract themselves. The creative team from the first highly kinetic (and very good!) action-thriller returns in stuntman-turned-director Sam Hargrave and screenwriter Anthony Russo (you know, the guy who co-directed some Marvel movies with his brother Joe Russo), who’ve concocted another collection of action set pieces strung together with a story you could sum up in about a dozen words, but with a new twist: This time – say it with me! – THIS TIME, IT’S PERSONAL.

EXTRACTION 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: SPLASH. Tyler Rake hits the water. A blood cloud slowly poofs out around him, but don’t worry, it’s not enough blood lost to kill him. He washes up on a riverbank and is medicoptered off to a hospital where he lies comatose until he’s no longer comatose, but it was long enough that he needs PT and a wheelchair now. His compatriot Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) sets him up with a little retirement villa in the middle of a lovely mountainside forest in Austria, where he uses his one good arm to chop wood, and hangs out with his dog, and goes to town to buy a couple of chicken friends. He is a sad man these days, but then again, I’m pretty sure he was also a sad man during the times when he was an unstoppable action figure, a Master of Extraction who routinely machine-gunned bad guys into bloody wads of goo while rescuing folks.

Meanwhile, in Kojori, Georgia: Ominous music plays. In a rowdy prison where inmates slap-fight each other in the cafeteria lives a man named Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani), and you know he ain’t nice because he has scars on his face and tats on his face. He and his brother Vakhtang (Levan Saginashvili) are some hard-ass mofos who run a billion-dollar drugs-’n’-guns organized crime ring dubbed the Nagazi, which you may have noticed is two letters away from being “agaz.” Zurab has a wife, Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili), and two kids, young Nina (Miriam and Marta Kovziashvili) and teenage boy Sandro (Andro Jafaridze), who aren’t particularly fond of being confined in a windowless prison cell “for their own protection” – although it doesn’t protect them from that brute Zurab, for whom domestic violence is just another awful thing he does.

One day, Rake is just chillin’ with his arm in a sling and his leg in a brace when Idris Elba drops in for a cameo. He’s got a job for our guy, who doesn’t particularly want or need a job right now, but Idris Elba In A Cameo has an ace up his sleeve, which won’t be revealed until later in the movie, but it involves extracting the living daylights out of Zurab’s poor wife and kids. Rake sighs and agrees – just when they thought I was out, they etc. etc. – and gets to his Rocky IV rehab routine of throwing rocks and running through snow and REALLY chopping wood, like, chopping the SNOT out of it. He recruits his buds Nik and Yaz (Adam Bessa) from the first movie to help him get back into the extraction game, and next thing you know, they’re sneaking into a Georgian prison and finding themselves in a really long shot without a cut, a strategy that always works, because why would a filmmaker stage and execute a ridiculously long “single-shot” action sequence (read: with the type of digital edits [read again: light cheating] that allow such things to exist in the first place) just to see the heroes fail?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Digital edits? You won’t complain, because the sequence is pretty exhilarating, and draws inspiration from The Raid and Children of Men – while the rest of the film rests on its Bourne and Wickisms.

Performance Worth Watching: With behind-the-camera technicians like this, who needs actors? The characters here could use a sprig of parsley or three to go with their meat and potatoes – so let’s shout out cinematographer Greg Baldi for executing some of the insane stuff we see here. 

Memorable Dialogue: Rake sums up his character with two one-liners:

Ketevan: Nagazi are here. Soldiers. These men are killers.

Rake: Yeah, well so am I.

And –

Vakhtang: I’m going to enjoy killing you.

Rake: Yeah, get in line.

Sex and Skin: You’ll perhaps be disappointed to learn that “extraction” has nothing to do with doin’ it.

Our Take: Extraction 2: now with MORE extractioning! The big “shot” – or “oner” in the parlance of the craft – in the first film clocked in around 12 minutes, and the centerpiece here pushes the half-hour mark. It goes from baby-I-had-to-crash-that-SUV to baby-I-had-to-crash-that-train to baby-I-had-to-crash-that-helicopter all without taking a breath, so to speak. Some people find this type of look-ma-I’m-not-cutting direction indulgent and obnoxious, and consider its video-game visual acumen to be beneath the ART of FILM. But as someone who’s endured countless unambitious action movies – I’m looking at you, you too many chintzy Fast and Furiouses and slo-mo Michael Bay crapshows – I beg to differ. It takes skill and chutzpah to compose, choreograph and consummate a big, crazy, complex centerpiece sequence like the one in this film, digital trickery or otherwise. Gatekeeping the method seems ridiculous when Hargrave makes 30 minutes of film feel like five. It’s movement, movement, movement, with enough purpose – save the woman and children from their abuser! – to keep us invested.

Granted, Extraction 2 isn’t exactly Athena in its ambitions; Hargrave’s film has nothing to say beyond hey, look at the cool shit we can do. Hemsworth’s easy-charm comedic skills are reduced to deadpan grunting, adhering to the Stallone/Norris/Arnold tradition of men who speak softly and carry a big grenade launcher – but Rake gets enough of a character arc here to make us almost care about his emotional well-being. (At the very least, his dog would prefer it if he lived through all this rigamarole.) We could sit here and nitpick how the story is rudimentary and that the bad guys, as usual, have presumably graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship, since their bullets routinely fail to hit any vital target. But Hargrave’s ability to maintain suspense within cleverly staged action is reason enough to fire up this escapist fare. I laughed at it quite a bit, to relieve the intensity of the chases and firefights and fisticuffs, and because some of it is supposed to be funny. This and John Wick 4 are a firm reminder that physical comedy need not be beholden to pratfalls and faceplants – headshots can be hilarious, too. 

Our Call: Be happy that Extraction wasn’t a oner-and-doner, because Extraction 2 is just as much fun. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.