Extraction 2 review: Chris Hemsworth deserves better than this
The star acts with more than his trigger finger but there are a few reasons why Netflix’s Extraction 2 is still a disappointing movie.
Extraction 2 (MA15+)
Netflix
★★
The action movie Extraction 2, starring Chris Hemsworth, is well named as two stars is the most it can extract from this critic.
It’s a disappointing sequel to the smarter, better Extraction from 2020.
Each film is directed by former stuntman Sam Hargrave and this time that skill is almost all there is to see as Australian SAS soldier turned mercenary Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) takes on another mission.
It’s maximum action, minimum everything else that makes a good movie, including plot twists, compelling dialogue and strong acting.
There is a bit of character development. We learn more about Tyler’s past life as a husband and father. The best scene is when is ex-wife asks him why he left her and their son.
It has some emotional depth and Hemsworth acts with more than his trigger finger. “I couldn’t f--king fix it,” says a man who can shoot helicopter gunships from the sky.
There’s also some humour, most of it unintentional in the that’s-laughable sense. The one intentionally funny moment features Idris Elba. He’s an unnamed man who lobs at Tyler’s house somewhere in Europe to offer him a new assignment.
Tyler’s in his lounge room with his dog and chooks, drinking beer and watching an AFL game on TV. The alpha male vibe could detonate the place. The man skulls a beer, looks Tyler up and down and says, “If I was you, which I am clearly not …”
The assignment is to free a woman, who happens to be Tyler’s sister-in-law, her teen son and young daughter, from a prison in Georgia. They are the “guests” of her husband/their father, an imprisoned Georgian crime lord. His brother runs the drugs-weapons-murder business from the outside.
This jail break is the first of two extended guns-knives-fists fight scenes that make up this 123-minute movie. The second one takes place, with more or less the same participants, minus the million extras who die along the way, in Vienna.
The script, by the famous Joe Russo, is full of lines such as “copy that” and “reload”. It looks like the filmmakers thought a high body count is all an action movie needs. It isn’t.
Elemental (PG)
In cinemas
★★★
There’s a moment in Leonard Cohen’s song Joan of Arc where the Maid of Orleans seems to embrace her fate. “If he was fire, oh then she must be wood.”
The animated comedy Elemental is also about two elements that should not mix: fire and water. Fire is Ember Lumer (voiced by Leah Lewis) and water is Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie).
Earth and air are also involved.
These anthropomorphised elements live in Element City, which the director, Peter Sohn, compares with the racial melting pot of his native New York.
It’s a PG Disney-Pixar movie, so parents can rest assured there are no burnings at the stake. There is a neat joke for the mums and dads when a rubber-stamping bureaucrat named Fern Greenwood (Joe Pera) has his leaves more than a little singed.
Ember is a young woman with an explosive temper. An only child, she is destined to take over her parents’ general store, The Fireplace.
Wade is a city official who weeps at the drop of a hat. In the movie’s best scene his family plays the “crying game”. They tell each other stories – about butterflies and windshield wipers and so on – and the aim is not to cry.
Ember and Wade meet when he does an inspection of her father’s jerry-built store. When he rises from her flooded basement, she checks him out and exclaims “Dang!”
I thought of Colin Firth’s wet shirt moment in the 1995 BBC TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Unlike Mr Darcy, he’s a gentleman at heart. When he tells her, “You’re so hot. You’re smoking” he only speaks the literal truth.
And so the spark is struck between fire and water, two elements that can extinguish each other. “My dad would boil you alive,’’ the hot-headed one tells her dripping wet beau.
He tells her, “There are a million reasons why this can’t work – a million nos – but there is one yes.”
Here the comparison is Romeo and Juliet and the film does make some clever – and PG-appropriate – passes at Shakespeare’s tragic love story.
Sohn is a Pixar animator and voice actor. This 110-minute movie is his second time in the director’s chair, following The Good Dinosaur (2015).
The animation is good without being spectacular. It’s fun to see fire, water, earth and air in human form. The flashback where Wade relives his childhood trauma with a sponge will make young and old laugh out loud.
This movie has been released in time for the winter school holidays. I saw it in a cinema packed with under-10s and they seemed to enjoy it.
The Covenant (MA15+)
Amazon Prime
★★★½
“You are here to translate,” Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) tells local conscript Ahmed Abdullah (Dar Salim) soon after their first meeting in the Afghanistan war drama The Covenant. Ahmed looks the heavily armed American special operations soldier in the eye. “Actually I am here to interpret.”
That exchange goes to the complex relationships explored in this unconventional war movie directed and co-written by English filmmaker Guy Ritchie.
It’s unusual that one of the lead characters is an Afghan. We see the conflict partly through his eyes. He is married and his wife is pregnant. He has a history with the Taliban.
“You’re a dark horse, Ahmed,” Kinley says. Denmark-based Salim, who was born in Iraq, that other post-9/11 hot spot, is brilliant as a man who knows more than the Americans ever will.
It’s how he will use this knowledge that no one – perhaps not even himself – is sure about. Will he help the American infidels or betray them? Others, their families held by the Taliban, choose the second path.
As do the young Taliban fighters, no more than teens, who kill and are killed. Are they all Islamic hardliners or are some of them there for other reasons?
This 123-minute movie is told in three separate stories that connect the two main characters: the American sergeant and the Afghan who interprets a language the invaders do not know. The battle scenes are intense and the tension is drum tight, so I’ll mention only the first story. It opens, in a clever touch for a movie that considers the difference between translation and interpretation, with an aerial shot of the unforgiving Afghan landscape and America’s song, A Horse With No Name.
It’s March 2018 and Kinley is in command of a unit that searches for factories that make improvised explosive devices. They stop a truck and the translator questions the truck driver.
“Shame on you, bastard. You are helping the infidels,” the driver tells his uniformed compatriot before flicking the switch that turns the truck into a bomb.
Fast forward a week or so and Kinley signs up Ahmed as the new translator.
He looks a little older than his American “boss” and it’s immediately apparent he will call his own shots.
“We don’t need an interpreter for this,” Kinley tells him as the troops move into a combat zone. He’s not quite right about that, then or later.
The unit is asked to investigate a mine that is suspected to be an IED plant. It is 120km from base. This high-risk mission takes us into the second and then third stories, each of which ratchet up the power of the film.
Gyllenhaal is good as the intense American sergeant, a man who has a wife and two young children back home. A scene where he tells his colonel what’s what is riveting. It’s a moment that also goes to the broader meaning of the title. Kinley and Ahmed each have a covenant with the US Army and one with their families.
What happens if they are forced to choose between the two?
And Kinley and Ahmed have their own covenant. This movie has its share of hard combat action, but deep down it is about the bond forged between two men who should never have met.
This film is timely. It is almost two years since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul. The overarching covenant is between the US forces and the Afghans who signed up as interpreters.
In return they were promised special immigration visas and relocation to the US. An estimated 50,000 Afghans took up this offer. This thought-provoking film is the story of one of them.