Extraction (2020)
REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER
*MILD SPOILER BELOW*
A capsule review of the Russo Brothers' EXTRACTION on Netflix would describe it as thrilling and kinetic, with a forward momentum and open depiction of violence that rivals the visceral bone-crunch of Gareth Evans' masterpiece, THE RAID.
The Russos have been promising this film ever since they laid out their plans to take action cinema as their own in their double-episode paintball-battle finale of the tv series COMMUNITY.
Here, they write and produce, handing directing duties to stunt co-ordinator Sam Hargreave, who has been directing stunt work for the Marvel cinematic universe and for films such as ATOMIC BLONDE (watch Charlize's set-piece stairwell fight.)
Like the JOHN WICK series, the stunt-coordinator as director gambit pays off. In terms of delivering tense, visceral, action cinema.
The story involves the son of a drug lord in Bangladesh being kidnapped by a rival drug lord. Chris Hemsworth plays a mercenary, whose job is to rescue the boy and bring him home. Except things go wrong and Hemsworth and the boy find themselves on the run from every gangster and cop in the city. Bullets fly, people die.
Hemsworth is exactly how you want him to be. Taciturn, tough, quietly spoken, handsome. I want to be rescued by him, too.
There's one single-take 11 minute sequence that is worth studying, not just for the fight choreography in a tenement block, but because of the way Hargreave uses the single take to choose which character to follow, switching a couple of times mid-flight, and using the switch-and-follow to ramp up the tension level, so we wonder where the other character is and how they will rejoin the ballet. It's smart directing. There is much to applaud here.
My problem with the film is that is places no value whatsoever on any of the "other" lives outside of the core characters.
This is highlighted early on when a group of young boys on a rooftop are being confronted by the rival drug lord and his henchman. The lord wants to know who has been stealing his money. The boys say nothing. The henchman picks up a young squealing boy and tosses him off the roof. One of the slightly older boys steps forward and says the thief was the boy who was just pitched off the roof. The lord congratulates the Older Boy for his ingenuity (or maybe the boy had watched Schindler's List, from which this scene is pinched.) The boy who plummeted to his death (we hear the impact below) is never commented upon. The scene exists to show us how bad-ass the drug lord is, and to introduce the Older Boy, who partakes in a sub-plot running through the movie.
Is it unacceptable to say nothing of the boy who was murdered, or show nothing of the impact of his death on his family? His life, the film tells us, for he was just a poor street urchin, has no value. IN A FILM whose story is predicated on the value of boy of a similar age being rescued by a team of mercenaries.
The subjectification and objectification of characters is a key ingredient in how cinema works, and EXTRACTION may be a valuable film in allowing us to ask - in the wake of first-person shooter games, from which the film can claim to take part of its aesthetic - the question of what death (and, therefore, life) on screen means.
The film is full of carnage and death. Many people die in exchange for the life of the one boy. Not just gangsters, but policemen and bystanders.
If the film-makers ever were to ask what all the deaths mean, then the film would fall apart, for it is a fragile genre. (Yet it is a genre I love.)
Are there race implications in the film's handling of death? Yes, because too many Bangladeshi lives are shown to have no value whatsoever while we are rooting for our white God-like hero to pull through with his one young Bangladeshi charge.
And yet, it is thrilling and exciting. Randeep Hooda is excellent as the son's security guard; David Harbour gives great cameo; and Hemsworth is to die for.