Extraction Movie Review: Chris Hemworth film gives an engaging action packed film till it takes it seriously.

Extraction is an action film that has all kinds of ingredients to make it a slick action thriller. 

A one-man army, armed and ready to go. A young boy abducted for massive ransom. Countless men with machine guns. A rescue mission that goes south. And a body count that goes north, every time you blink. Not stuff that you haven’t seen before, no. A lot of Extraction, a Netflix original, is an actioner that has been cobbled together from bits and bobs of similar movies. What keeps you watching is the rat-a-tat-tat pace when the going is hot and heavy, and also, paradoxically, when the characters slow down to catch their breath and exchange a few words.

Hemsworth, putting his trademark Thor hammer behind him, goes down and dirty in this one, which is located mostly in the seedier side of Dhaka, via Mumbai. His mercenary-for-hire Tyler Rake, hair mussed, eyes creased, weighed down by a tragic back story, is in search of redemption. And that comes in the shape of saving fourteen-year-old Ovi Mahajan (Jaiswal), son of an incarcerated drug lord (Tripathi), from vicious mob boss Asif (Painyuli). 

Choreographed to appear as if it has been shot in one take, the Extraction action sequence begins with a car chase, which turns into a foot chase, peaks with a knife-fight, and ends with a thunderous mic-drop that would surely have sent a packed house into rapturous applause had the film been released in theatres and not on streaming. Although I suspect more than a few viewers at home might unleash a silent cheer. 

Co-produced by Joe and Anthony Russo, Extraction, whose popularity in India stems from the fact that it was largely filmed here and features a bunch of talented local actors, is the shot of adrenaline that we all need right now. It only helps that in addition to being a spectacular action film, Extraction also happens to be a well-written drama as well. 

Structured in the straightforward manner of a classic Western, particularly the 1953 classic Shane (which has also inspired films such as Logan and Children of Men), Extraction stars Chris Hemsworth as a morally ambiguous mercenary named Tyler Rake, who is handpicked to stage a daring rescue mission to locate and extract an Indian drug lord’s teenage son, who has been kidnapped by a rival Bangladeshi mobster and hidden somewhere in the of the city of Dhaka. 

Extraction tries its bit to probe aspects of three separate father-son relationships. Apart from the abducted Ovi - a confident Jaiswal does not let anything around him, not even a Hollywood megastar in great form, swamp him - the narrative has many a boy who pays the price of a lost childhood. One of them nearly loses two fingers to prove his loyalty to his gangster boss but, despite the odds, he continues to serve as a foot soldier who counts for nothing.

There’s not much space in a Hemsworth-produced film for too many other faces, but still, the desi contingent does get a look-in: Hooda as the not-quite-sure-which-side-he’s-on is watchable as always, Jaiswal as the terrified companion-on-the-run settles into his groove after an initial fumble or two, Tripathi comes in for a flash. Painyuli, as the baddie with a penchant for chopped fingers, gets a couple of stand-out scenes, with his young slumdog-in-training, the interestingly-scarred Rikame. These two turn on real menace between them. 

The rest is the familiar wham-bam-bam-bam escape fantasy. Stands to reason because of all its Marvel connections. But then Extraction never set out to be any other kind of film. And for what it is, right now, in these lockdown times, it does what it needs to: where the good guy, even if he is a white first-world saving the slummy third world, one bullet at a time, comes out on top.

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