Extraction pulls you out of lockdown

Broken bones, headshots, badass baddies, double crossing villains, antiheroes! There’s nothing that Extraction doesn’t have by the bucket load.

Starring Australian heartthrob and intergalactic god of thunder Chris Hemsworth, Extraction takes you on a fast-moving rollercoaster of first-person shoot-em-up and eye-piercing assault rifle bullets hitting the ground.

The plot is a very familiar one if you’re a fan of the genre made infamous by Liam Neeson’s ex-CIA dad, Bryan Mills in the Taken franchise. Hemsworth plays a hardened and somewhat suicidal ex-elite solider who’s hiding some serious pain under the muscles and flak jacket. He’s a mercenary hired to retrieve the son of a deadly Mumbai drugs lord from the stronghold of his rival in the pulsing city of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

And the main location of Dhaka adds zoom to everything. The crowded streets make the car chases exhilarating and frightening; the apartments that are crashed through make the action claustrophobic and constantly ask you what next. The cinematography stunningly brings you to the teeming third world city.

Of course the region’s Bollywood is world-renowned for its own action-packed content. The Hindi film industry is worth 2.4bn dollars – not to be sniffed at. But this is still seven times less than Hollywood. And so it’s a treat to see India and Bangladesh collide with the evergreen hills of Hollywood.

Another aspect of the filming is the roles for south Asian ethnicity actors who get near equal billing with Thor with his native Australian accent. There are significant roles for his Terminator-like counterpart, Randeep Hooda and femme fatale liaison officer played by Golshifteh Farahani, who handles a rocket launcher like she just stepped off the set of Expendables. There are also haunting roles portraying life as a kid from the slums, a corrupt general and Dhaka’s version of Pablo Escobar.

As you might have guessed by now, there’s not really much in the plot that we haven’t seen already, some Bourne like camera angles of our hero jumping off rooftops, a nifty super fast reload stunt straight from the “How to be John Wick” tutorial book, double-crossing and then redemption.

It’s a film that doesn’t ask a lot of the viewer and/but one that inevitably will stay in the UK Netflix top ten slot for a while. Given these strange quiet times, this type of carnage and busy city is exactly what people are craving. Having seen the likes of Dustin Hoffman’s, Outbreak, and Matt Damon’s, Contagion play out in real life, extreme escapism is at the top of everyone’s watch list.

Given these strange times, this type of carnage is exactly what people are craving

There are a couple of plot holes that require you to completely disengage your brain, though. The biggest is the kidnapped son – exactly how old is he supposed to be? He starts off very shy in school, unable to talk to the girl he has a crush on, to being alone in his room and then texting his friends to meet them in a club. Very strange. It makes you wonder if there was a sequence left on the cutting room floor that put the pieces together a bit better, or whether there is a subtle cultural reference here, that again needed more explaining, but that jarred a little as you’re just not sure how scared for this kid you’re supposed to be.

The baddies are BAD, the first scene we meet the kidnap organiser is not for the faint hearted, and the level of violence throughout is about normal for this type of film. Years ago it would have been all we talked about, but the constant supply of Rambo-esque one-upmanship over the years has desensitised us to the point that if a film has a gun in it and we don’t see some blood or a severe injury, we’re left feeling empty. It’s rightly an 18 certificate.

Nonetheless some scenes leave you questioning just how cheap life might be in a city like Dhaka.

Without giving any more of the plot away the film hints at some type of sequel, which we will all be clambering to see especially if the lockdown continues over summer. Overall the film (in it’s genre) gets a solid 8/10. Not one to rush off and see but one that ticks all the right boxes for a Netflix and Chill-out type of day.