Netflix has something going for them with the Extraction series. In the inventory of their biggest-buck action flicks,* the roughly $75 million Extraction 2 stands out amidst the likes of the $200 million Red Notice and the $150 million 6 Underground. A sequel to the 2020 Chris Hemsworth spy engine, Extraction 2 is the best English-language Netflix original action film I’ve seen. Internationally, as far as I can vouch (and I’ve yet to see the French Lost Bullet series), only the Vietnamese Furies (2022) and the Indonesian The Night Comes for Us (2018) are superior.
Television exempt, the original streaming service creates very few originals that actually control a sustained film discourse, good or bad. Extraction 2 feels like it could be one of Netflix’s very rare discourse drivers—and of the good variety.
Picking up immediately where the first film left off, the Aussie black ops operative Tyler Rake (Hemsworth, who notably kills someone with a rake in the first movie) just escapes death in Mumbai. Recovering in Austria until Idris Elba ruins his retirement to offer a mission extracting his ex-wife’s sister and her children from a Georgian prison where her abusive cultist-gangster husband has trapped them, Rake sees an opportunity to atone for his past familial sins.
As expected in international action-thrillers, there’s quite a bit of globetrotting in director Sam Hargrave’s second outing with Hemsworth. In the first 10 minutes, Hargrave speeds through four separate countries before hunkering down in a Georgian prison for the better part of an hour. (The production team didn’t film in Georgia as far as I can tell, though: just Austria, Australia, and Czechia.) And as a cinematic globetrotter myself, this always earns a film some good grace, though the speed through which the filmmakers plow their way through locations is itself something of a statement against this trope. One gets the sense they are only doing so because the genre demands it, not because their story does. Only the Austrian chapter, with a fight from the iconic DC Tower 1 in Vienna’s District Donaustadt, utilizes the “exotic” location. The rest could have been set anywhere in the world with only minor alterations.
The prison extraction is the best action scene I’ve seen so far this year: from an on-fire fist actively throwing punches to brutish hand splitting, the filmmakers show a wonderfully unapologetic and uncouth addiction to creativity. The 21-minute one-shot that captures the breakout is exhausting—and I wouldn’t blame someone if that’s a put-off—but the relentless energy is exactly what the scene needed. If Rake loses focus for a split second, he dies. He doesn’t have time to turn away from the action, and the camera doesn’t have time to break for an edit.
The first film sidelined Golshifteh Farahani, one of the world’s greatest living actors and likely the only person on the planet capable of acting in seven languages, as Nik Kahn, the pretty-face “girl in the chair” that ordered Rake over the phone. Until the film’s final scene where she stands in place and shoots a gun in one direction while yelling, she has no part to play with, no character to probe. In the sequel, she’s given a real role. Her chemistry with Adam Bessa, who plays her brother and mercenary teammate Yaz Kahn, hands the film its most persuasive emotional stimulus. When a mercenary teammate is killed, she gives a visceral performance (in her third, maybe fourth, language, I might add) that leaves her uvula trembling on camera. Even if it still feels like a waste of one of the best artists in the history of acting, Hargrave at least remembered to give her something to do this time around.
There’s also something a bit ’90s to Extraction 2. Hemsworth’s Rake is an old-school actioneer, a man with noble convictions and honorable motives. He’s still a trained killer, and a damned good one, but the whole warm-hearted heroism thing is imbued with a sense of contrivance that feels straight from an earlier generation of filmmaking. Hemsworth also receives a few lines in Georgian, which also somehow feels pretty ’90s to me, but don’t ask why or how.
In a different way, the film is ultramodern. Nation states basically don’t exist in Extraction 2. The symbols of the military apparatus of Western nations have been erased, along with their foreign interests, to mere relics and decorations. The muscles of the state—the police—only exist as easily maneuverable extras in need of killing. In Hargrave’s post-political world, patriotism can’t be a real motive and allegiances can only be personal. The only thing more modern would have been a series of Fakistans to replace Georgia, Austria, and Czechia.
*I’m unsure “blockbuster” even makes sense as a shorthand for them since the term’s filmic etymology depends on the theatrical release that Netflix philosophically refuses.
Extraction 2
2023
dir. Sam Hargrave
123 mins
Streaming Friday, 6/16 on Netflix
