Chris Hemsworth is back as Tyler Rake, mercenary for hire and extractor extraordinaire, in “Extraction 2.”
Jasin Boland | Netflix | TNS
Having barely survived the adventures of the first film, soldier for-hire Tyler Rake returns for “Extraction 2.” Played again by Chris Hemsworth, Rake is recovering in a remote cabin in Austria when he is visited by a mysterious handler (Idris Elba) and charged with rescuing the wife and two children of a Georgian gangster held in a ruthless prison.
Soon Rake has reassembled his team, the brother-sister duo of Nik and Yaz (Golshifteh Farahani and Adam Bessa), who spend their downtime looking chic in a suite situated on the Amalfi Coast. (Where’s their movie?) From there the film is a headlong rush of action, occasionally pausing for needless dramatic scenes.
Directed again by Sam Hargrave from a screenplay credited to Joe Russo (also a producer with his brother Anthony), the new film sketches some of the details of Rake’s life before the first film, a tired reliance on backstory to essentially fill space. The family connections drawn by the story — Rake’s ex-wife Mia (Olga Kurylenko) has also hired him to save her sister Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili) — start to unravel pretty quickly if you stop to think about them, so it is best to just keep moving along, as the movie does.
While the first film was reportedly among the most-watched on the Netflix site, honestly, did anyone say, “I want to know more about that Tyler Rake?” More likely, if they gave the first film a second thought at all, what they said to themselves was, “I would watch some more action scenes with that guy.”
The new film attempts to deliver on that promise by breaking the story into two extended action sequences. One is a more than 20-minute prison break (the extraction of the title) largely told as if in a single unbroken take. Building upon a similar sequence in the first film, Harvgrave goes bigger, louder, longer, and more over-the-top, but it is so apparent that there are hidden cuts and digital enhancements to what is being shown that it loses any of the impact that extended-take action supposedly conveys in the first place.
At one point, the camera is hoisted up from a basement through a coal chute and moments later is sailing over a brick wall, where Hemsworth fights his way across a prison yard riot, is briefly set on fire and punches a man with his arm ablaze.
The story eventually returns to Vienna and an extended siege based around the city’s tallest building, the DC Tower skyscraper. There is much kicking and punching and shooting and a surprising amount of stabbing. Where the “John Wick” series often finds a balletic grace in close-quarters mayhem, Hargrave and Hemsworth prefer to fashion something more lumbering, action told in dad jeans rather than a tailored suit.
It cannot possibly be a spoiler to say that the film ends with a tease for another adventure. If the first film seemed indicative of much of what is wrong with movies in the streaming era, feeling inessential and disposable, a cog in a machine rather than something unique, “Extraction 2” is a snapshot of a sequel in this moment, bigger, expanded and even less necessary.
‘Extraction 2’
MPA rating: R (for strong/bloody violence throughout and language)
Running time: 2:02
How to watch: on Netflix
