Another popular movie running on Netflix. This is a fairly-run-of-the-mill ‘killer seeks redemption kind of a story starring Chris Hemsworth (y’know … the Mighty Thor) as a mercenary trying to save the kidnapped son of a drug lord.
There’s nothing here that really sets it apart from other movies with morally ambiguous action heroes, but I did like it: the film has heart, as well as some of the most devastating action sequences I’ve ever seen (yes, even better The Old Guard from a few days back). Hemsworth manages to deliver a surprisingly sophisticated air of hard-bitten vulnerability, and his young charge (ably played by Rudhraksh Jaiswal) convincingly takes apart the soldier’s emotional armour and finds the makings of a hero inside. Pretty good stuff, actually.
And you can’t fault the film for atmosphere: it’s set in Mumbai and Dhaka and you really get the sense of overcrowding and the heat (I actually opened a few more windows halfway through). The stunts are superb and the final battle scene is epic.
Extraction isn’t for everybody, but you like the hard-hitting bare-knuckle savagery of films like Ong Bak, and the kind of bullet-ballet you see in John Wick then it’s well worth seeing.