IN-HOME THEATRES: Extraction

Mercenary Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is recruited to rescue the kidnapped son (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) of an imprisoned Indian drug lord.

Despite some complications, the exchange of the kid for the ransom goes well. Until Tyler and Ovi (Jaiswal) are ambushed on their way to the extraction point.

Trapped in the city, with the police, the drug lord's enemies and an enforcer with his own reasons for taking the boy (Randeep Hooda).

Watching Extraction is like watching a checklist of action movie cliches. The central character is a burned-out mercenary with nothing to live for. The story involves him turning selfless gaurdian/saviour for a young boy. Layer onto said story the familiar white saviour trope, and you are left with a pretty generic action thriller that could have come out any time between the the beginning of cinema and today.

While it looks slick and has some solid set pieces (director Sam Hargrave is a former second unit director and stuntman), there is a frustrating lack of originality to the enterprise. What makes it worse is that there is a better movie hiding in this one, if you just moved the point-of-view.

When David Harbour shows up, the movie gets a slight charge of electricity, but his appearance in the story feels so predictable and rote, with a series of predictable revelations and an obvious twist of loyalties that made me wonder why I should keep watching.

There is a secondary antagonist, Saju (Hooda), one of Ovi's dad's lackeys, to re-capture him away from Rake and the mercenaries. It turns out his father cannot pay the ransom or the mercenaries, so he threatens Saju's family, basically blackmailing him. Compared with Rake's generic trauma, Saju's is the more dramatic and emotionally resonant motivation, and Hooda brings a frenzied panic and pathos to the role that is missing from the rest of the movie. 

Watch Extraction made me realise a sad fact: Chris Hemsworth is not a star. He is likeable, but he lacks the magnetism, the weight and the sense of history to fill a cookie-cutter role like this.

I also think Hemsworth is miscast - he seems most comfortable in comedy (and then he needs a strong ensemble and material to spark off - see last year's MIB International), but in dramatic roles there is a superficiality to his emotions and reactions that leaves me cold. He is also not a minimalist - he does not draw you in, and he does not convey weakness. He feels too together.

Harbour appears as an old friend of Rake's, who offers the pair shelter. He brings a much-needed dose of personality, and immediately highlights the blankness of the star's performance. He is only sabotaged by the rote-ness of the part.

The script is not the only issue. 

While it is not as explicit as the last couple Rambos, the violence in Extraction is used to paint the mostly Indian villains as the most objectionable form of evil. While Rake does not make the xenophobia explicit ala London Has Fallen's Mike Banning, it does make the movie feel like more of a throwback to the white saviour narratives of the 80s (including Temple of Doom and the third Missing In Action movie), in which traumatised white action heroes rescue (and are spiritually renewed by) children. 

This movie is so uninspired in its plot development you can see this arc coming a mile away, and the filmmakers are not savvy enough to offer some kind of revision which would justify it. Once again, when you have Saju doing exactly the same thing as Rake, it is hard not to see how this movie could have been improved simply by flipping the central role and having Rake as the antagonist. 

As a first-time director Hargraves does a decent job. The photography is largely clear, and he shoots the action wide so we always know where people are. It is a bummer - this kind of technical competence is sorely lacking in too many action pictures. I just wish it was in service of a better script. There are times where he goes overboard - the one-take action sequence goes on a beat too long, and there is a rubbery-ness to some of the camerawork and action (aided in post-production) that made it feel like a video game. 

While it is not awful, Extraction is aggressively unoriginal in terms of its narrative and themes. While it is nice to see a big budget generic action movie again, this movie proves that there is a limit to how generic you can be.

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