‘I’ll need an army.”
“Then hire a f..king army!”
That order, from a jailed Indian drug lord to his visiting second-in-command, sets up the entertaining high-stakes thriller, Extraction.
The 2IC doesn’t hire an army, but he rents Chris Hemsworth, which is not a bad Plan B.
The mission is to rescue the drug lord’s son, who has been kidnapped by a Pakistani rival and is being held in Dhaka. As someone points out, it’s the “biggest drug lord in India versus the biggest drug lord in Pakistan”. That, agrees Australian mercenary Tyler Rake (Hemsworth), “sounds like some mythical shit”.
Tyler is at home in the Kimberley when he is offered the job. He’s camping with some mates on the edge of a cliff. When he wakes up, he swigs a beer and jumps from the cliff into the water far below. What he does, once submerged, says a lot about him.
The beautifully cool co-mercenary (Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani), who choppers in to see if he’s available, doesn’t like his drinking or his laid-back air. Perhaps she doesn’t know many Australians. In any event, he knows the job is his because “no one else is going to commit to something this f..ked up”.
He’s right, so it’s off to India and then Bangladesh to extract 14-year-old Ovi Mahajan (Indian actor Rudhraksh Jaiswal). What an experience it must have been for this 16-year-old. He got to hang out with Thor in fatigues. In one interview he said the hardest part of the role was, “I did not want to make any mistakes in front of Chris”. His Facebook page is full of photos of the two of them having fun off set.
And it is the relationship between the troubled mercenary and the conflicted rich teen that makes this movie work. The scenes between them start out simple — soldier kills a lot of people to rescue hostage — but develop into something far more emotional as we learn more about each of their lives.
The extraction of the title does not end with Ovi being freed from the street thugs tasked with holding him in Dhaka. That’s a doddle for a special forces soldier.
The real extraction is to get him out of Bangladesh, where a Pakistani drug lord (an excellent Priyanshu Painyuli) has high-level friends in the army and the police. “I want every gun in Dhaka pointed at this guy,” he instructs an army general.
That’s the starting gun on the life-or-death story that unfolds at high pace over the next two hours. This movie is the directorial debut of Sam Hargrave, a stunt co-ordinator best known for his work with the Russo brothers on Avengers and Captain America movies.
Anthony and Joe Russo are producers, as is Hemsworth. The script, drawn from a comic book called Cuidad, is by Joe Russo. The cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel, has shot X-Men movies but also non-superhero dramas such as The Usual Suspects, Three Kings and Bohemian Rhapsody.
That’s a lot of serious talent behind this Netflix Original and by and large they pull it off. It’s Jaiswal’s performance, though, and the subcontinental setting, that lift it beyond the average shoot-’em-up thriller.
It’s interesting, in the early scenes, to see a different India. Ovi’s father uses his ill-gotten gains to keep his family in luxury. Ovi goes to a private school and, after school, to chic dance clubs. This is no Slumdog Millionaire, though it’s the same city: Mumbai.
The moments between Tyler and Ovi are a highlight, especially as they come to understand each other. Tyler acts like a bloke with a death wish, and we gradually learn why this may be true. Ovi looks like a young man who has been treated as a valuable possession rather than a loved child, and he knows it and hates it.
Hemsworth and Jaiswal clearly enjoyed each other’s company, and this comes through on screen. Hemsworth also likes a joke. The word “mate” pops up a lot as bullets fly. And there’s a brutal but still funny moment where a manifestation of his surname — Rake — comes in extremely handy.
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This movie is MA15+ and that leads to its weakest point: the almost non-stop violence. I can’t remember a recent film — leaving out pandemic ones — with such a high body count.
It’s not a weakness because it exaggerates the violence but because it shows too much of it. A little more telling and assuming and a little less showing would be better. Perhaps this is a hangover from the director’s main job as a stunt co-ordinator. And the stunt scenes, by the way, such as the mandatory car chase, are brilliant.
There’s a good scene where Ovi tells Tyler how it makes him ill to sit at the dinner table with his father, because he knows his father had killed the fathers of boys like himself.
Yet Tyler does the same. All the police and soldiers he kills, men just following orders, are sons, and lots of them would be fathers.
Perhaps that’s the overall point of this movie: that there’s no good or right violence. The final scene, which I think touches on this, is ambiguous and haunting.
Extraction (MA15+)
Netflix
★★★½
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