Extraction (2020) is the latest iteration of the “kinetic ballet” school of action filmmaking typified by John Wick (2014), but dating at least as far as John Woo’s seminal Hong Kong production Hard Boiled (1992). Some may trace this loose concept of a “school” back further, to ever more obscure HK/Chinese martial arts movies, but Hard Boiled proved the value of choreographed, kinetic gunplay (and explosions!) better than anything.
All these films attempt - and succeed to various degrees - to avoid visual cliche. We have seen men shooting each other in a million films. We had not seen combatants diving across rooms shooting each other through walls - before Hard Boiled. For systemic reasons Hollywood has been mostly unable to reproduce that Hong Kong style - even when employing Woo himself. That is, until Chad Stahelski re-married stunt choreography to film direction in John Wick. It turns out (judging from the 3 Wick movies) there are infinite combinations of ways men can kill each other and novel suspense can be endlessly wrung from the “how” of it. While Extraction falls short of John Wick in many ways, director Sam Hargrave brings novel techniques to the genre.
A word from President Not Sure (Idiocracy):
And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
Maybe it can, but these films offer an alternative: the ass farts ever more interestingly. What if 100 asses farted in slow motion with extra bass effect? Wait, am I here to praise these films or damn them?
Hitchcock basically advocated a “100 asses” approach to eliminating visual cliche, and assiduously avoided messaging in his films. We could possibly date the kinetic action ballet back to North By Northwest. We cared about the motivations of Cary Grant as much then as we do about Chris Hemsworth’s in Extraction. Which is to say, not at all.
Still, Hemsworth has a natural charm which carries through a bland script focused on delivering us into a wildly innovative 40-minute action sequence. Here the “camera” is a character with full freedom of movement - there is no static montage. The “camera” impossibly climbs around Hemsworth like a monkey as he stabs and shoots his way through a small army. It gets distracted, follows bad guys to create subplots, follows the kid Hemsworth is protecting, follows the other badass at cross purposes with Hemsworth. We are dizzied by it’s path. All this time in the background: a kaleidoscopic swaying view of the densely packed urban jungle of Dacca, Bangladesh, slightly lower resolution behind the foreground violence.
It’s a far more expensive film than John Wick or Hard Boiled and it shows. My brain nearly broke trying to figure out how these action scenes were placed in a teeming city with thousands of extras. Hemsworth must be in a green studio somewhere, surrounded by a mass of cameras capturing his every move for rotoscoping. To marry this to a chaotic location as Hargrave and crew have done here is in itself an achievement worthy of praise. I’ve never seen it’s like.
A stab is made at a theme about the cycle of violence or something. There is an interesting subplot involving a young man recruited to the gang Hemsworth is murdering. The acting is good all around and in result, we care about Hemsworth’s enemies more than we do about him. Hemsworth seems to care as well, since a decision to leave the young man alive and humiliated will come back to haunt him in the end. Well, maybe not, after Netflix slaps a happy coda on the end that promises a sequel (which is in the works, I understand).
The biggest flaw of Extraction is that it never recovers its momentum once the big action scene winds down. But its well worth your time, regardless. Given this is the most-watched Netflix film of all time (as of this writing), you probably don’t need me to tell you.