Extraction 2 (2023) Review

“Extraction 2” Teaser Poster

Director: Sam Hargrave
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Golshifteh Farahani, Adam Bessa, Olga Kurylenko, Daniel Bernhardt, Tinatin Dalakishvili, Idris Elba, Andro Japaridze, Levan Saginashvili
Running Time: 122 min. 

By Paul Bramhall

In the closing scene of 2020’s Extraction, we saw Chris Hemsworth riddled with bullets and left for dead in Bangladesh, falling from a bridge into the river below to sail away into the great beyond. Except, Extraction is an action movie, and if there’s one thing the action genre has taught us, it’s that you can’t keep a good guy down. From Jason Statham in Crank to Scott Adkins in The Debt Collector, comparatively getting hit by a few bullets and plummeting to your supposed death is one of the more plausible comebacks in recent times, and sure enough 3 years later we have Extraction 2.

Picking up directly after the events of the original, Hemsworth is found washed up on the riverbanks and transferred to Dubai, where he eventually regains consciousness after spending 9 months in a coma. Ushered into retirement by his former teammates, played by a returning Golshifteh Farahani (The Upside) and Adam Bessa (Of Sound Mind) as sibling mercenaries, he’s put up in a remote cabin in the Austrian wilderness. His new peaceful life is soon interrupted though by an agent who turns up on his porch, played by a cameoing Idris Elba (Beast), who offers him a job. Extract a mother and her 2 kids from a prison in Georgia, where they’re being kept against their will by her husband, one of the most feared gangsters in the country who’s serving time there. Although initially not interested, he soon reconsiders once it’s revealed the job was requested by his ex-wife, and that the mother is his former sister-in-law.

The job is due to take place 6 weeks later, so cue a 20 second montage consisting of Hemsworth lifting and pulling a variety of heavy rocks, and just like that he’s good to go in possibly the fastest rehabilitation ever put on screen. From there, its cue the action, lots of it! Let’s be fair, the action is exactly what audiences are clocking into Extraction 2 for, and returning director Sam Hargrave (Unlucky Stars) is smart enough to know it. Coming from the camp of stuntman turned director that the likes of David Leitch and Chad Stahelski followed, Extraction was his debut in the directorial chair, and it proved to be a competent slice of action filmmaking. The sequel is his sophomore feature as a director (in between he’d clock in an action consultant credit on 2022’s Interceptor, a vehicle for Hemsworth’s wife Elsa Pataky), and it quickly becomes clear that the mission here is to go bigger and louder.

For the action seeking audience, that’s good news. Much was made of the 12-minute one shot action sequence in the original, and here Hargrave and his action team look to outdo it by creating a 20-minute one take shot. It’s an admirable ambition, with the current popularity around one-shot action sequences dating back to the staircase fight in 2017’s Atomic Blonde, of which Hargrave was a part of the fight choreography team. Extraction 2 brings onboard a similar amount of talent for its action sequences, with 3 fight choreographers credited in the form of Travis Gomez (Boss Level), Nuo Sun (The Great Wall), and Kaiser Tin-u (The Last Manhunt). Here the sequence to get the one-shot treatment is the extraction of the family from prison, and it’s an adrenaline pumping ride encompassing gun fights, an epic prison yard brawl, and a vehicular chase involving armoured vehicles, motorbikes, helicopters, and even a train.

I know there are some action fans out there who bemoan the one-take shot, since in reality they’re usually several shots which have been edited together in post to make them appear seamless, but personally I’m not one of them, and consider the technique a genuine advancement in action filmmaking. It kind of feels like wirework in classic Hong Kong action movies – audiences either love it or hate it. For me, I enjoy one-take scenes in much the same way I enjoy watching someone fly halfway across the room from being kicked, even though I know they’re on a wire. It still takes a lot of skill to be able to execute, and Hargrave and the crew have pulled out all the stops for the sequence here.

If I was being cynical, I’d say much of the best action in the sequel plays like a best of 21^st century Asian action cinema served up for a western audience. The prison yard brawl obviously takes inspiration from a similar sequence in The Raid 2, the whole helicopter versus train scene feels like it owes a debt of thanks to Carter (is Jung Byung-gil the most influential action filmmaker out there right now? The motorbike scene from his movie The Villainess was also replicated in John Wick 3), the final fight in the church is reminiscent of the finale in Raging Fire, and several kill techniques are lifted straight from The Raid. While such influences will be apparent to any fan of Asian cinema, it’s to Hargrave’s credit that none of them feel derivative of their source, and there’s a feeling of genuine sincerity and appreciation in the way that they’ve been incorporated into the narrative.

The brawl in the prison yard is particularly bold in its execution, in that a large part of it plays out without any soundtrack, a piece of action filmmaking that many would consider an essential ingredient (I always point people to the soundtrack used for the Iko Uwais vs. Cecep Arif Rahman fight in The Raid 2 as a perfect example of how music can elevate a fight scene). It takes a significant amount of trust to purely rely on the strength of the choreography and the physicality of those performing it to sell the scene, but Hemsworth and the many stuntmen that populate it do a stellar job of doing exactly that. Thankfully there’s also plenty of originality on display in the action design, with one particular piece of bodily harm involving a hand being a highlight (you’ll know it as soon as you see it), and a fight that plays out in a gym allowing for some creative choreography that incorporates the fitness equipment.

Whenever action isn’t onscreen, Extraction 2 fares less well, with any attempt at adding drama falling resoundingly flat. Olga Kurylenko (The Princess) cameos as Hemsworth’s ex-wife, and a scene in which they discuss how he went off on a tour of duty to Afghanistan while leaving their terminally ill son in hospital feels more cringe inducing than it does the intended emotional gut punch. It’s not that its badly acted so much the fact that, as an audience, we have no investment in their loss since so little time has been spent on it. Throwing in an emotionally intense scene out of nowhere was never going to work.

As the ruthless villain of the piece, Tornike Gogrichiani (Neighbours) ironically gets the most well-developed character out of everyone. Playing the brother of Hemsworth’s former sister-in-law’s husband (that was a mouthful – in short, he’s Die Hard with a Vengeance’s Jeremy Irons to Die Hard’s Alan Rickman), he’s also a feared gangster, and proceeds to blaze a trail of revenge to kill Hemsworth and his extended family no matter what the cost. Gogrichiana’s crew consists of the likes of the hulking Levan Saginashvili (considered the strongest arm wrestler in the world) and former UFC fighter Megan Anderson, making for some satisfyingly physical scuffles amongst the bullets and RPG’s. An extra element of tension is introduced through the rescued son feeling conflicted as to where his loyalties lie – with his mother who wanted to escape the criminal life, or with his pursuing uncle who wants to bring him into the fold.

Unlike the John Wick franchise there’s a no-frills lack of pretentiousness to the Extraction movies, and they should be applauded even more for being one of the few action productions out there that doesn’t look to replicate the ‘one shot one kill’ style that the Keanu Reeves starring franchise popularised. Extraction 2 offers up 2 hours of solid action entertainment, delivering exactly what it set out to, and does it far better than most action flicks out there. While the ending of the original left a degree of ambiguity as to if we’d be getting a sequel or not, here it’s left much more clear cut, with Idris Elba returning in the final scene to offer Hemsworth another ‘job’. Here’s hoping he takes it. 

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8/10