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Binge guide: 5 things to watch if you love extraction, looking for more bonkers action impossible missions some tender trained-killer/innocent-kid moments step right up extraction fans, we've got five titles to target..

TAGGED AS: Action , binge , movies , streaming , TV

When the Russo Bros.-produced action-thriller  Extraction   landed on Netflix in April, it arrived with all the heft of a major theatrical release. Much of that was because quarantined fans were  dying  for something big and splashy and new to watch – anything , really, that felt like going to the movies – but it was also because the film came with the kind of big-budget action set pieces usually reserved for the big screen – and the big-screen leading man, Chris Hemsworth, to go with it.  Extraction ‘s story is simple: Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake (yep, that’s his character’s name!) is a mercenary hired to “extract” a kidnapped teenage boy from the clutches of a Bangladeshi crime boss, and he must contend with countless nameless baddies to achieve his goal. The action, though, is anything but: close-combat  John Wick -style tussles, epic single-shot sequences,  Bond- level escapes from hairy, bullet-filled situations. Fans have been eating it up; but it’s a short-lived meal. When the smoke on  Extraction  has cleared, and you’re looking for something to keep the adrenaline pumping, we’ve got some suggestions for you. Whether you’re after more urgent-feeling get-the-job-done thrills, a tender – and violent – kid/mercenary relationship, or just incredible chaotic action, let RT correspondent Naz Perez be your guide in the video above.

Extraction (2020) 67%

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Tyler Rake, a fearless black market mercenary, embarks on the most deadly extraction of his career when he's enlisted to rescue the kidnapped son of an imprisoned international crime lord. Tyler Rake, a fearless black market mercenary, embarks on the most deadly extraction of his career when he's enlisted to rescue the kidnapped son of an imprisoned international crime lord. Tyler Rake, a fearless black market mercenary, embarks on the most deadly extraction of his career when he's enlisted to rescue the kidnapped son of an imprisoned international crime lord.

• Sam Hargrave
• Anthony Russo
• Chris Hemsworth
• Bryon Lerum
• Ryder Lerum
• 3.1K User reviews
• 249 Critic reviews
• 56 Metascore
• 4 wins & 15 nominations

• Rake's Son

• Ovi Mahajan

• Cop #1 Candie's Cafe
• Cop #2 Candie's Cafe
• Prison Guard

• Ovi Mahajan Sr.

• Saju's Housekeeper

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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia According to director Sam Hargrave , the nationwide ban on firearms on location in India was so strict, the production had to import rubber prop guns without any moving parts. For the first major action rescue sequence, for example, these dummy weapons were used exclusively without any blank rounds being discharged. The entire sequence had to be digitally animated in post to give the impression that shots were being fired.
• Goofs When the Colonel shoots at the heroes with his sniper rifle, the sound of the shots is heard before bullet impact. High-powered long-range rifle bullets typically travel at over twice the speed of sound, so the bullets would hit before the shots are heard. Additionally, in an urban setting with tall buildings, there would typically be a series of echoes from the loud gunfire.

Ovi Mahajan : "You drown not by falling into the river, but by staying submerged in it."

• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Extraction (2020)
• Soundtracks No See Written by Man.Goes Human Performed by Man.Goes Human

User reviews 3.1K

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• Apr 24, 2020
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• Dhaka is the capital city of Bangladesh. Is there any relation to Dhaka city?
• The Movie was shot in Ahmedabad, India but why was it initially called Dhaka, which is the capital of Bangladesh?
• Is Dhaka as underdeveloped as the movie portrays it?
• April 24, 2020 (United States)
• United States
• Official Site
• Out of the Fire
• Dhaka, Bangladesh
• T.G.I.M Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $65,000,000 (estimated)

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• Runtime 1 hour 56 minutes
• Dolby Atmos

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Extraction review – hokey, high-octane action thriller

Chris Hemsworth plays a super-tough mercenary on an all-guns-blazing mission to rescue a crime lord’s kidnapped son

S adly, this has nothing to do with dentistry. Extraction is a made-for-Netflix action thriller from veterans of the Marvel Comic Universe – screenwriter Joe Russo, stunt-specialist-turned-director Sam Hargrave and star Chris Hemsworth . It’s based on the graphic novel Ciudad (which Russo co-authored), transferring the action from the Paraguayan city of Ciudad Del Este to Dhaka in Bangladesh.

Extraction is a little bit hokey and absurd, and the very end has an exasperating cop-out – but it has to be admitted that, in terms of pure action octane, Russo and Hargrave bring the noise, and there are quite a few long-distance “sniper” scenes in which people get taken out from miles away as the bullet travels through their skulls with a resonant thoonk.

Hemsworth is the improbably named Tyler Rake, a super-tough mercenary soldier and legendary warrior, secretly sad and lonely. When the school-age son of Mumbai crime lord Ovi Mahajan (Pankaj Tripathi) is kidnapped by rival Bangladeshi mobster Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli), Tyler is hired for a staggering sum of money to go in to Dhaka – all guns blazing and combat knives stabbing – to get the kid back. Extract him, in fact. But when he does, Tyler realises that he is being double-crossed all over the shop and he finds that the only human being he quite likes is Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the terrified boy now under his protection.

So the odd quasi-father-son couple go on the run in the teeming, chaotic streets, and there is some impressive stunt work and fantastically steroidal action sequences. Golshifteh Farahani plays Tyler’s handler Nik, whose job it is to make earpiece contact with him, in the now accepted Mission: Impossible style, although there isn’t much here for her to do. A few earsplitting bangs for your buck, anyway.

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Extraction 2 Is Trying So Hard

Watching Netflix’s Extraction 2 , I didn’t really care about anything that happened to the characters onscreen, but I did find myself starting to feel for the film’s director, Sam Hargrave, who works overtime to lend this brick of a movie some semblance of imagination. A veteran stunt professional, Hargrave directed the first Extraction , which came out in 2020. I’ve somehow seen that film twice and yet my memory of it is just a miasma of tedious head shots. The sequel certainly represents a step up from that effort. The kills, of which there are many, are infinitely more creative this time, even if the story and characters remain thoroughly forgettable.

It didn’t have to be this way. I don’t know what more Hemsworth has to do to demonstrate his considerable charm and comic timing — as evidenced in his outings as Thor, his scene-stealing cameos in the comedies Ghostbusters (2016) and Vacation (2015), and his layered, entertaining turn as the smarmy villain of last year’s Spiderhead (another Netflix production) — but the Extraction movies seem determined to use him in the most uninspiring way possible. As Tyler Rake, the series’ haunted Aussie black-ops mercenary, the actor is stoic, silent, and humorless. There is a reason for this: Tiny flashbacks throughout tell us that at the heart of everything Rake does is an attempt to make up for abandoning his young son on his deathbed. The film gives us just enough of this motivation to make that clear — and yet not enough for it to resonate in any meaningful way. All Hemsworth is asked to do is stare off into space. As a result, there’s an emotional void where the movie’s heart should be.

But he can fight, and he can move, and Extraction 2 uses its star’s physical abilities well — particularly in an extended, 20-minute-plus single-shot prison escape, beatdown, and chase that marks the movie’s high point. Of course, it’s not really a single shot. There are clearly digital stitches hidden amid all those whip-pans and dark shadows passing through the frame. And in some ways, this extended sequence represents the film’s shortcomings as well, as its creativity gradually curdles into tedium.

Let’s talk about this for a bit. The setup of the sequence is simple. (Everything in this movie is simple.) Rake has agreed to help extract a woman, Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili), and her two kids from a Georgian prison where they are being housed alongside her mobster husband, who wants his family by his side while he serves out his sentence. At first, the delirious camerawork following Rake and his wards through the bowels of the crowded, labyrinthine prison enhances their confusion, and the frantic pace accelerates as the various inmate gangs rise up and attack our heroes. Then we move on to a big, crowded prison-yard mêlée involving axes, guns, knives, shovels, grenades, and one movie star with a flaming arm. This section is genuinely uproarious. (It’s a shame that most people watching Extraction 2 will have to experience this inside of their existential-content cocoons and not in a rowdy movie theater.) Alas, the one-shot sequence keeps going after that into a car chase, a train chase, and a helicopter chase, and after a while, what’s happening onscreen ceases to matter, because it seems like the only thing the filmmakers care about is keeping this tired visual gimmick going. By the time the umpteenth black car is getting bazooka’d into oblivion, we can smell the desperation behind the camera.

These show-offy single-take sequences certainly have their place. My favorite film from last year (and maybe my favorite film of this young decade), Romain Gavras’s Athena , was built partly around a series of so-called oners . But in Athena (also produced by Netflix), these sequences spoke to the exaltation and release of the story’s central rebellion. They expanded the film’s metaphor, allowing one banlieue uprising to become a vision of a broader, warlike conflict. Athena ’s formal daring matched its thematic ambitions, in other words. If such connections exist in Extraction 2 , I missed them. Mainly, it’s all just neat — impressively mounted and increasingly meaningless.

Still, that’s not nothing. Hargrave’s directorial bravado and perverse imagination occasionally help transcend the generic story and characters. (The screenplay was written by Joe Russo, based on a 2014 graphic novel he created with his brother Anthony Russo and Ande Parks.) A guy gets pitchforked in the neck. Another gets his face plastered into a furnace before his hand is ripped in half. Then some other guy gets his head smushed with a dumbbell. At least one helicopter blows up real good. There’s a fight on a glass rooftop that’s fun for about half a minute. You get your kicks where you can.

Certain action movies rely mainly on getting the viewer excited about the inventive stunt work and pyrotechnics onscreen with little care given to establishing any real emotional engagement. Extraction 2 can’t quite pretend to be one of those, because it does try to move us — and mostly fails. But it’s clear that Hargrave’s interests (and skills) lie in the realm of staging gonzo action set pieces full of creatively garish violence. I can’t wait to see what happens to him next. Tyler Rake, not so much.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, extraction 2.

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Overseen and conceived by the Russo Brothers of Marvel fame, the "Extraction" films are an example of a dwindling breed: the big-budget, super-violent adventure. Whether the main character is named John Rambo, Jason Bourne or John Wick, he's a variant on a type: the prolific killer who'd prefer not to kill anymore but keeps getting pushed back into it. He has a tragic past and is grieving over it. And he's played by a guy who's so ferocious in violent scenes that you'd believe that he could take 100 blows to the head, face, and torso, plus a gunshot, a knife wound, and a grenade concussion, and keep going.

Critic Robert Brian Taylor calls these movies part of " The Sad Action Hero canon ." Chris Hemsworth is its most notable new member. He plays Tyler Rake—a young boy's idea for an action hero name, but Hemsworth makes him seem almost like a real person. He's a tremendous physical actor, possibly as good as Schwarzenegger and Stallone in their primes, but with more range. He's played a scheming male bimbo, a legendary computer hacker, a depressed mercenary, a 19th-century whaler, a cult leader, and the mighty Thor, all convincingly. He's got a bit of the young Sean Connery's self-aware swagger as well. But there's also a buried sadness to him, and that's what the "Extraction" films dig out.

Tyler used to be a special forces soldier with the Australian Army. He chose to go to Afghanistan for yet another tour of duty while his son was battling an incurable disease and was not present when the boy died. Then his marriage fell apart and he became a mercenary. Guilt over husbandly and parental failure is as much of a driving force in the "Extraction" franchise as amnesia in the "Bourne" films and mourning in the " John Wick " series. Tyler's adventures are redemption stories, set in action movie purgatories filled with shadow versions of the hero: defective fathers who mistreat, neglect, or warp their children and see them as extensions of their ego or brand. Tyler's main enemies are dark parents who could be stand-ins for Tyler's own masochistic feelings about how badly he failed his family.

The first "Extraction" showed Tyler rescuing the kidnapped son of an Indian drug lord who was being held in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The kid was a pawn in a pissing match between rich bullies with private armies. In accepting the mission Tyler offered himself up as a karmic punching bag, absorbing punishment for his past mistakes in an urban hellhole-purgatory (in the original graphic novel, the setting was Paraguay) while serving as a quasi-father figure to the boy he was protecting. In this one, an unnamed man ( Idris Elba , so charming that one hopes he'll be in the third one) shows up at the cabin in the woods where Tyler is recovering from the previous mission and delivers a message from his ex-wife, who, as it turns out is Georgian. Her sister and her children are being held in a Georgian prison by her drug dealer husband Davit ( Tornike Bziava ), who had the clout to get them all ensconced with him. Rake is hired to bust the family out of prison and take them away from Davit and his brother Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani), who's even more of a psycho. Complications ensue. All you need to know is that the film is three long action sequences with a bit of character development sprinkled in.

The first is an uninterrupted 21-minute action sequence following Tyler and the family through a wild prison break and onto a train that's chased across the tundra by helicopters filled with armed thugs in body armor. Any thugs who aren't killed in midair drop onto the train and fight Tyler and his two allies, Nik ( Golshifteh Farahani ) and Yaz ( Adam Bessa ), with guns, fists, knives, and whatever objects are lying around. Director Sam Hargrave , a former stunt coordinator who made his directorial debut on the first "Extraction," takes the digitally-stitched-together, super-long "oner" that was introduced to viewers in mid-aughts films like Steven Spielberg's " War of the Worlds " and Alfonso Cuarón's " Children of Men " and pushes it to ostentatious but admittedly dazzling extremes.

Like the long take in the original "Extraction," it has a video game feeling. Cinematographer Greg Baldi's camera often adopts a first-person or over-the-shoulder vantage point, as in a "shooter" game. The point-of-view moves in and out of moving train cars, varies its distance to get tight closeups of people's anguished faces or panoramas full of moving vehicles and people, and generally does things that are against the laws of physics as well as the rules of production insurance companies. Despite the Eastern European blue-gray filters and bloodletting and bone-crunching, you're aware that that the sequence is no more "real" than the Avengers battling Thanos. Some composited landscapes and helicopters don't pass the believability test, and a few big camera moves that take us from outside to inside and vice-versa are too clever for their own good. But it's all so intricate and expertly timed that you still appreciate it, as one might a performance of a piano concerto so difficult that just hitting the notes is beyond most players' capabilities.

The other two major sections of the film are modeled, respectively, on the first " Die Hard " and one of John Woo's classic doppelgängers-battle-each-other films (probably "The Killer," which like this film, climaxes in a candlelit church with doves fluttering about). They're imaginatively conceived and executed with no-fuss virtuosity, though the cutting is sometimes too frenetic and the camerawork too wobbly (a lot of the time, Hargrave is doing a modified version of that Russo Bros' "shaky equals excitement" style). But they face the unusual problem of being good enough to anchor nearly any other action epic yet feeling like a letdown because they follow that jailbreak-to-railway sequence. 

There's also a subplot about one of the ex-sister-in-law's kids, Sandro (Andro Japaridze), who has been trained from birth to be a gangster just like his dad and uncle, supposedly being torn between recognizing his family's multigenerational legacy of violence and brainwashing and choosing to go in a different direction, or taking up arms against the hero to get payback for Tyler killing one of his loved ones during the jailbreak. Anybody who's seen a Sad Action Hero movie knows how this part of the story will turn out—they're not going to write out Chris Hemsworth—so you play the waiting game.

Hemsworth and his castmates are thoughtful, capable actors. They take this assignment seriously. They dig into the psychological trauma and guilt aspects of Joe Russo's script, imbue them with a "graphic novel" variant of seriousness (i.e., pulp fiction played solemnly), and elevate "Extraction 2" beyond glorified video game status. But there's not enough dramatic substance, either in the writing or the marketplace-capped amount of screen time, to satisfyingly flesh out Tyler and his immediate circle. The film is single-mindedly focused on giving viewers more and more and more bang-bang. It wants to be a John le Carré novel and a cinematic equivalent of a shooter game at the same time. The first "Extraction" nearly pulled it off in scenes where Tyler bonded with an old merc buddy played by David Harbour , who was even more cynical than Tyler and turned out to be untrustworthy. It gets close again here in a scene where Tyler faces his deepest regrets in conversation rather than as metaphors while in combat. But for the most part, the series hedges its bets to appeal to what it apparently considers its main audience: viewers who deem anything related to characterization and atmosphere to be "filler."

Still, you might appreciate the series' attempts to anchor military-adjacent shoot-'em-up adventures in something like reality, and give all of its major characters situations to play that are a step above the standard action film tropes. Where most contemporary Hollywood movies are aimed at the child in every grownup, the "Extraction" films speak to the potential grownup in every kid. Although it's rated "R," its ideal audience might be 12. The scenes between parents and their disappointed offspring capture that feeling you have when you're young and suddenly realize that the adults you once revered are human beings who can fail you and are often faking it.

Now playing on Netflix. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Extraction 2 (2023)

Rated R for strong/bloody violence throughout and language.

123 minutes

Chris Hemsworth as Tyler Rake

Rudhraksh Jaiswal as Ovi Mahajan

Golshifteh Farahani as Nik Khan

Adam Bessa as Yaz

Justin Howell as Gio

Olga Kurylenko as Mia

Tinatin Dalakishvili as Ketevan

Tornike Bziava as David

Patrick Newall as Seb

• Sam Hargrave

Writer (story by)

• Anthony Russo

Cinematographer

• William Hoy
• Alex Rodríguez
• Alex Belcher
• Henry Jackman

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Movie Review: Chris Hemsworth returns in ‘Extraction 2,’ a gun-for-hire who pulls you completely in

This image released by Netflix shows Chris Hemsworth in a scene from “Extraction 2.” (Jasin Boland/Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Golshifteh Farahani, left, and Adam Bessa in a scene from “Extraction 2.” (Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Golshifteh Farahani, left, and Chris Hemsworth in a scene from “Extraction 2.” (Jasin Boland/Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Chris Hemsworth in a scene from “Extraction 2.” (Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Tornike Gogrichiani in a scene from “Extraction 2.” (Jasin Boland/Netflix via AP)

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Tyler Rake was clinically dead when we last saw him at the end of “Extraction,” tumbling over a bridge in Bangladesh with a fatal, burbling bullet wound to his neck. But death is no match for Netflix.

Chris Hemsworth returns as the sad-sack, gun-for-hire Rake in “Extraction 2” and you’ll thank the giant streamer for such a nifty bit of resurrection because this franchise is pure cinematic adrenalin.

The new movie comes two years after a surprisingly good first installment, which saw Rake intervene in a feud between two rival drug dealers, survive numerous double-crosses, ask things like “How many hostiles onsite?” and lob an inexhaustible number of grenades.

How he survived it all stuns even his friends. Emerging from a coma in “Extraction 2,” he is stashed in a remote chalet in Gmunden, Austria, and told to chill out — learn to knit, go on hikes, try to reach mindfulness. “Enjoy retirement,” he is told. If he did there would be no “Extraction 2.”

Inevitably, a new extraction job comes along, so cue the getting-in-shape montage of Hemsworth doing pushups in the snow, splitting firewood, pushing a sled filled with rocks and some light ax throwing. Somehow, the “Extraction” movies lean into all the cliches but they don’t feel old.

Hemsworth is re-joined here by Marvel Comic Universe–screenwriter Joe Russo and stunt-specialist-turned-director Sam Hargrave, but their ace-in-the-hole is their cinematographers, who create impossibly long single takes of complicated fighting or driving scenes that put the viewer directly into the action like few other thrillers.

Last time it was Newton Thomas Sigel. This time, Greg Baldi stages a breathless rescue from inside the winding tunnels of a brutal Georgian prison, complete with a full riot, a flaming police shield used as a weapon, a car chase with motorcycles and rockets, a race through a factory and then onto a train moving 40 mph, where helicopters are shot down and there’s more hand-to-hand combat aboard. It’s a 20-minute tour-de-force — the kind of sequence that brings you up from your seat to applaud, even if you’re on your couch. And there’s more than an hour to go.

“Extraction 2” seems to have more money this time around — I’m sure they’d like to apologize for using a lot of it to trash downtown Vienna — but unlike other action franchises, it doesn’t waste it on pretty excursions to Paris museums or five-star Tokyo hotels.

The strength of these movies has always been being down in the mud, streets and dirt, with the sound of spent cartridges pinging off concrete. These characters sweat and they bruise, even if many look fabulous in sunglasses.

The baddies here are similar to the first installment — a pair of powerful, scarred brothers who run heroin and guns in Georgia and are quiet-talking psychopaths, the kind who whisper a metaphor and then plunge a rake into your throat.

We learn a bit more about Rake and even meet members of his extended family, but he remains a one-note emotionally suppressed man. One knock on the franchise is that it hasn’t been able to take advantage of Hemsworth’s humor, like Marvel has done with his Thor.

Family is at the heart of “Extraction 2” as Rake gets in between this Georgian clan and also seeks to keep alive his trusted handler, Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani, seriously good, a franchise spin-off anyone?) and her cool-as-silk sidekick brother (Adam Bessa).

Death will only free one side and, along the way, a fancy rooftop gym will be turned into a charnel house, a skyscraper will be virtually razed by rocket fire, an airfield will explode in a fiery mess and a church will be wrecked — sorry, God. But death isn’t the final word — in this franchise, that’s relative.

“Extraction 2,” a Netflix release that airs Friday, is rated R for “strong, bloody violence throughout and language.” Running time: 123 minutes. Three stars out of four.

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Online: https://www.netflix.com/title/81098494

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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‘Extraction 2’ Review: No Escape

Chris Hemsworth returns as an Australian mercenary in this bloated, banal action sequel.

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By Robert Daniels

“Extraction 2,” a drab, brawny sequel starring Chris Hemsworth as an Australian mercenary, offers a turgid shadow of the type of crowd-pleasing escapism that action blockbusters used to provide.

The shaky foundation of the director Sam Hargrave’s movie is a trite script by Joe Russo: Recovering from near-fatal wounds he incurred on his previous mission, Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) wakes from a coma. He retires to a quaint cabin in the woods, a gift from his comrades Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) and Yaz (Adam Bessa). It’s a quiet life, surrounded by a dog and chickens, until a mysterious man (Idris Elba) offers him a job: Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili) — Rake’s ex-wife’s sister — and her two children are being held captive in a Georgian prison by their abusive mobster father (Tornike Gogrichiani). Regrouping with Yaz and Nik, Rake devises a plan to save them.

Foregoing any semblance of a story after its initial setup, “Extraction 2” can be separated into three distinct, noxious action sequences. The most elaborate, lasting an interminable 24 minutes, sees Rake infiltrating the facility housing the family, then fleeing with them past claustrophobic cells, through a crowd of prisoners determined to murder them all, and, finally, onto a runaway train.

Edited less-than-seamlessly to look like a single shot, the scene attempts to one-up a similarly elaborate chase from the previous film . But such long sequences require a director and their cinematographer, in this case Greg Baldi, to be cognizant of the story bodies can tell through motion (think Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” and John Woo’s “Hard Boiled” ). Hargrave lacks such feeling and grace; he merely plants explosions in view of a spinning, swirling, ducking and diving camera in the misplaced hope of building tension.

This movie sacrifices character development — what’s Nik or Yaz’s back story? — in favor of bloated, banal combat scenes. Hargrave tamps down the hints of attraction between Nik and Rake before the two can strike an ember, and leans on narrative shortcuts — including incoherent flashbacks showing Rake’s deceased son — to reach for an unearned pathos. Hemsworth and Farahani do their best to rise above the saccharine material, grasping for human moments amid the vacuous melees. But burdened by its bluster, “Extraction 2” is merely a loud, blithering mess masquerading as fulfilling escapism.

Extraction 2 Rated R for strong, bloody violence throughout. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

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Russo Brothers take their talents to Netflix with ‘Extraction’

• Updated: Apr. 24, 2020, 8:43 a.m. |
• Published: Apr. 23, 2020, 10:01 a.m.

This image released by Netflix shows Chris Hemsworth in a scene from "Extraction," premiering April 24 on Netflix. Screenwriter Joe Russo calls the film "very emotional, very gritty, very intense, very violent and very inventive." (Jasin Boland/Netflix via AP) AP

• Joey Morona, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Russo Brothers are masters of subversion.

Cleveland-born filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo love playing with moviegoers’ expectations: from taking over a Marvel superhero franchise and turning it into an homage to 1970s conspiracy thrillers in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” to lopping off the villain’s head and time jumping five years into the future within the first 20 minutes of “Avengers: Endgame.”

The most successful directing duo in Hollywood history are at it again, looking to turn the action genre on its head in “Extraction,” premiering Friday on Netflix. The Russos produced the film, with Joe penning the screenplay. The movie is based on “Ciudad,” the 2014 graphic novel the brothers created with Ande Parks and Fernando León González.

“My brother and I grew up on action thrillers,” Joe Russo says, calling in from Los Angeles. “They were hugely important to us. Our father was a big action movie fan.”

In fact, it was the brothers' proud papa, Basil, who initially reached out to remind me of the film's release.

“Extraction” is indeed full of shootouts, fight sequences and chase scenes. The body count is relentless. But amid all of the action, the relationship between fathers and sons is at the heart of the film. “Thor” actor Chris Hemsworth plays Tyler Rake, a grief-stricken mercenary-for-hire mourning the loss of his son when he is recruited to rescue the kidnapped teenaged son of a Mumbai drug lord from the clutches of a rival crime boss in Bangladesh.

“It is a subversion of your standard action hero,” Russo says. “This is a character who presents himself as physically brave, but he’s an emotional coward.”

The filmmaker credits Hemsworth, whose Shakespearean superhero was transformed into the Big Thorbowski by the Russos in “Avengers: Endgame,” for showing off “incredible vulnerability” in the movie.

“I think this is his best performance, he’s fantastic in it,” Russo says.

But Hemsworth’s performance isn’t what will leave viewers breathless or have them reaching for the rewind button. It’s a 12-minute action sequence in the middle of the film as Rake and the boy, Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), try to escape the locked down city of Dhaka. Shot as one long continuous take, a technique seen in movies like “Atomic Blonde” and “1917,” the scene resembles a first-person shooter video game, following the pair on the front end of a chase through the streets of the crowded city, on car and by foot, through buildings and across rooftops, stopping every few minutes to avoid an explosion, gunfire, or a crash, or to engage in a highly intense knife fight.

The jaw-dropping scene is the work of first-time director Sam Hargrave, the stunt coordinator on the Russos’ last three Marvel films.

“[That sequence] is wonderfully conceived and so thoughtful. I think it ranks up there with the best of all-time,” Russo says. “I’ve rarely seen an action film that’s as accomplished and certainly perhaps never from a first-time filmmaker except for perhaps Chad Stahelski and David Leitch on ‘John Wick.’"

But now as the movie gets ready to hit Netflix, the question turns to how will quarantined viewers react to an ultra-violent action film set in the most crowded city in the world? Reviews so far have been mixed. Still, Russo thinks “Extraction” has something relevant to say about what the world is going through at the moment.

“It’s a movie about sacrifice,” he says. “It’s an international story and I think that right now, more than ever, we need to bond as a global community.”

Could a ‘Community’ movie finally happen? Joe Russo says he’s interested

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Extraction 2 Review

16 Jun 2023

Extraction 2

When  Extraction  hit streaming in April 2020, it came as a welcome action distraction in a pandemic landscape bereft of blockbusters. This sequel arrives to a far more crowded field, but if anything it’s more eye-catching and considerably bigger in scale. Director Sam Hargrave and star Chris Hemsworth have clearly pushed themselves and one another to go harder, higher and bloodier than ever.

We open with a reminder that Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake (still a ridiculous name) basically died last time. Slightly refreshingly, he does not immediately shrug it off, enduring months of rehab and serious impairment for the first act of the film. Then, of course, he’s back to 100 per cent form in no time — or by normal human standards, about 150 per cent.

The call back into action comes not via his usual BFF and manager Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) but via a mysterious man (Idris Elba), a messenger from his ex-wife. It turns out she needs him to rescue her sister from a Georgian prison, where her powerful drug-dealer husband Davit (Tornike Bziava) has been keeping her and their kids close at hand. Rake will have to go in, rescue the woman and children, and get them away from both Davit and his even more menacing brother, Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani). What could go wrong?

Hargrave, a stuntman turned director, knows where to put his camera for maximum impact.

Well, practically everything. From the moment that Rake is reunited with his ex-sister-in-law the plan goes pear-shaped, with a riot breaking out in the prison and a getaway complicated by Zurab’s improbably well-prepared strike teams. Hargrave and Hemsworth have hyped up the film’s quasi-oner , but the relentless pace of the prison escape lives up to the hype as Rake takes on all comers, and an integrated series of transport solutions, to get the small family out of their uncle’s sphere of influence.

Hargrave, a stuntman turned director, knows where to put his camera for maximum impact, and genuinely disturbing foley work showcases sounds of crunching bones and splattering blood. You feel every punch land. By comparison, Henry Jackman and Alex Belcher’s score often drops out entirely, replaced by the remorseless rhythm of semi-automatic weapon fire and helicopter blades. A couple of extended action sequences threaten to get too much, but Hargrave just about pulls it back, and adds a couple of witty touches, once again employing a rake as a deadly weapon and putting in what’s surely a deliberate nod to Thor for a giggle.

It’s shot with the same rather trite colour coding as the last movie: where Dhaka suffered from that awful yellow filter, Georgia and central Europe are, apparently, naturally tinged blue-grey at all times. But otherwise, this is a compelling example of the action genre. There’s more emotional depth than its ’80s forebears would have allowed, and a neat throughline about sibling relationships and what it means to be there for the ones you love. Gogrichiani is a compelling baddie, and Hemsworth, who was heartbroken and barely holding it together last time, works through a few issues as well as scores of disposable baddies here. Now if he can just stop getting stabbed, shot and burnt, he could have a bright future.

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Extraction Director & Stuntman Sam Hargraves to Direct Matchbox Cars Movie

Extraction filmmaker and former stuntman, Sam Hargrave, will direct the Matchbox cars movie for Mattel Films.

• Get ready for the Matchbox movie, directed by Extraction's Sam Hargrave and written by David Coggeshall and Jonathan Tropper.
• Matchbox Cars, a collector's item since 1953, will likely be a thrilling action film under Hargrave's direction.
• Mattel Films is also working on unique projects like a horror comedy Magic 8 Ball movie and an A24-style Barney film.

After the phenomenal success of Greta Gerwig's Barbie in 2023, Mattel promised that a plethora of movies based on their IP would be hitting theaters in the coming years. One of those films is Matchbox , based on the iconic toy cars, and the project has just found it's director. According to Deadline , former Captain America stuntman, and Extraction director, Sam Hargrave will be overseeing the movie, which is being produced by Mattel Films and Skydance. The report also revealed that David Coggeshall ( Scream: The First Kill ) and Jonathan Tropper ( The Adam Project ) are writing the film's script.

First produced in 1953, Matchbox Cars are die-cast toy cars, that have become a collector's item in the modern days of the internet. The toys were first produced by Lesney Products, but were purchased in 1997 by Mattel, who are now producing the movie under their cinematic department, Mattel Films. No plot details have been revealed yet, but knowing Hargraves' action-heavy style , expect Matchbox to be a non-stop thrill ride.

Tyler Rake, a fearless black market mercenary, embarks on the most deadly extraction of his career when he's enlisted to rescue the kidnapped son of an imprisoned international crime lord.

Hargrave started his Hollywood career as a stuntman, working on major productions like Supernatural , Transformers , Pirates of the Caribbean and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (where he doubled for Chris Evans as Captain America). Just like Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, Hargrave has moved from the stunts department all the way up to the director's chair, creating the Chris Hemsworth-led action franchise Extraction for Netflix.

Many Mattel Movies Are Now Being Made

After Barbie dominated the box office in 2023, there is now an expectation for Mattel Films to keep pumping out hits based on their beloved toy ranges. As well as Matchbox , there are several other exciting and unusual movies in the works by the studio. Some of the movies fit the tone and style of their respective toys, like the family comedy American Girl Dolls movie.

However, Mattel Films are also taking some major left swings with their IP, bringing in experienced creatives, and letting them go to town to create bizarre renditions of their beloved toys. One of the most anticipated Mattel toys movies is the upcoming Barney film . Despite being a children's TV show, the movie has been described by one Mattel executive (per Variety ) as an "A24 type" movie, drawing inspiration from films like Nicolas Cage's Adaptation and Being John Malkovich . Get Out star, Daniel Kaluuya is producing the movie, with the script being penned by Lee Sung Jin ( Beef ).

Barbie: How Greta Gerwig Critiqued Mattel in Its Own Film

The Mattel Films universe will seemingly span across a range of genres and tones. The upcoming slate of films includes a horror comedy based on the Magic 8 Ball toy, a Fast and Furious inspired Hot Wheels film (produced by J.J. Abrams), a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots boxing film starring Vin Diesel, and a Thomas the Tank Engine movie directed by Marc Forster ( World War Z ).

No release date has been announced for Mattel Films' Matchbox movie. Barbie is currently available to stream on Max.

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