Does a white saviour movie
become more palatable
because the white saviour
is Chris Hemsworth?
Extraction presents 'that' critical question!
Thor has been 
transported to Dhaka.
He’s now Tyler Rake, a fierce mercenary 
slicing and dicing through the bad guys.
His job is to rescue an Indian teenager 
from a brutal drug lord.
Tyler is of course 
more human than Thor.
He’s battered and bruised, 
both physically and psychologically.
But, even as he decimates 
the drug lord’s army,
Tyler is a thing of beauty.
Incredibly, he even kills 
a man with a rake.
Extraction is the directorial 
debut of Sam Hargrave,
the stunt coordinator on some of 
the biggest films in the MCU
including Avengers: Endgame, 
Avengers: Infinity War and
Captain America: Civil War.
Hargrave has worked extensively 
with the Russo brothers.
Extraction is based on a 
graphic novel,
co-written by Ande Parks and 
Joe and Anthony Russo.
The film’s screenplay has 
been written by Joe Russo.
The Russo-made MCU films found 
that sweet spot between story and stunts.
But Extraction, shot mostly 
in India, Bangladesh and Thailand,
is all about action.
Every sequence is 
elaborately choreographed
including one that is designed to look 
like a single, continuous shot.
It begins with a car chase, 
then morphs into a street battle.
Then knives and guns.
The climax unfolds 
on a bridge blocked by traffic,
the good guys and the bad guys play 
a bloody hide-and-seek amidst vehicles.
Hargrave doesn’t 
sanitize the brutality.
The violence is gritty and graphic. 
And it has consequences.
The men get breathless with exhaustion. 
They bleed and hurt.
There’s enough frenzy 
and dazzle here
and yet these sequences 
quickly become tedious
because the narrative is so banal.
Take Tyler – he has 
a handy tragic backstory,
which makes him the perfect mercenary 
because he cares too little about living.
This is established 
early in the film.
Tyler takes a 30-meter plunge 
into a lake in Australia.
I know the height because 
just before he does it,
a character tells us that the drop is 30 meters 
while another exclaims how high it is.
This is the equivalent of 
the standard Hindi movie scene,
in which it's established that 
the hero is a khatron ka khiladi.
And if you still don’t get it, 
one character tells Tyler:
You’re hoping if you spin the chamber enough times, you’re going to catch a bullet.
Of course he is.
So, Tyler takes on this 
suicidal assignment.
As somebody explains to him,
it’s the biggest drug lord in India versus 
the biggest drug lord in Bangladesh.
To which Tyler says: 
Sounds like some mythic shit.
Dialogue is not 
this film’s forte.
I think the subcontinent 
was chosen as the backdrop
because the heat and crowds, brown skin 
and smattering of Bengali and Hindi
instantly establish Tyler as 
a fish out of water.
But in combat, Tyler with a mug is 
more efficient than a local with a blade.
The body count piles up high.
The vicious violence is offset 
by the boy triggering it.
The sweet, gently disarming Ovi, played by 
the talented newcomer Rudhraksh Jaiswal.
Ovi’s father is also a 
powerful Mafiosi.
Poor Pankaj Tripathi reduced 
to exactly one forgettable scene.
Ovi is lonely and neglected.
Predictably, him and Tyler 
forge a bond
so that this becomes 
more than an assignment.
Tyler, who had once 
abandoned a difficult situation,
decides that he will see 
this one through,
which is of course, 
a very old movie trope.
Yash Chopra did it 
in 1979 in Kaala Patthar.
Amitabh Bachchan played Vijay, 
a disgraced naval officer
who risks his life at every opportunity 
so he can atone for his past mistakes.
There aren’t many surprises here,
except perhaps 
Randeep Hooda as Saju,
Ovi’s father’s right-hand man.
Randeep’s hair, styled to make him 
look like John Travolta from Pulp Fiction,
was a major distraction for me.
Also, I honestly couldn’t figure 
out what his plan was
or why he spent so long 
combating Tyler.
But Randeep, always reliable, 
gives it his best shot.
Hargrave and Russo don’t seem very interested 
in the personal histories of these characters.
They are paper-thin.
The lovely Golshifteh Farahani, 
playing an arms dealer,
pops up in the unlikeliest places.
She wears eyeliner even in a gunfight, 
but has little to do.
There’s also Priyanshu Painyuli 
as Dhaka don Amir Asif.
He has a nice, 
unhinged menace to him.
But, the don has henchmen who wear 
these black suits and striped ties.
Really? In that heat?
How do they get any work done?
This little detail made it impossible 
for me to take this film seriously.
You can see Extraction on Netflix.
