Extraction 2: This barely recycled snuff trash really makes you think (no, of course it doesn’t)

We hear a lot about Avatar’s supposed lack of cultural footprint. Nobody can tell you anything about the most successful movie of all time. Blah blah blah. Never mind that. What about the greater invisibility of Extraction? Released on Netflix in April of 2020 – the absolute sweet spot for streamed entertainment – the ear-bursting action flick clocked up 99 million views to become the service’s most-watched original film. Can you tell me what it was about?

A mere glance at any still from the film will probably fill in the gaps. Chris Hemsworth plays a stereotypically hard-boiled mercenary, formerly of the SAS, who is happy to blow away legions while freeing the unjustly detained. No eye is blinked. No quarter is given. It seems unlikely any protagonist of a summer release other than J Robert Oppenheimer will be responsible for so many deaths.

Anyway, after some laying up in hospital following the first film’s inconveniences, Tyler Rake (what a name) returns home to find Idris Elba waiting in a nice coat. Essentially playing the tape recorder at the start of a Mission: Impossible episode, our Idris explains that a Georgian family – folk not unknown to Rake – need to be broken out of detention in that former Soviet republic. They require ... extraction. Demonstrating a fearlessness of cliche, Rake (he really is called that) then allows a montage to show him chopping wood and pounding bags in the icy outdoors. You know. As if he were planning to box Dolph Lundgren in 1984.

[ Extraction: Great action, dodgy ‘white saviour’ optics ]

Extraction 2, again co-produced by the Russo brothers of Avengers fame, is unlikely to be mistaken for anything other than barely recycled snuff trash. But there is a chutzpah to the action that defies complete dismissal. A central sequence cut to look like one continuous shot of about 15 minutes is near unparalleled in its vulgar excess. It doesn’t have the bloody poetry of the John Wick films. It can’t match the rattle of a famous long take in the Wick team’s otherwise humdrum Atomic Blonde. But do those movies take you from prison breakout to car chase to massed helicopter attack on a speeding train? Does anything?

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Such flamboyance merely emphasises aesthetic similarities with first-person shooters such as Call of Duty. It’s just as loud. It’s just as empty. Alas, it doesn’t have a zombie option.

Extraction 2 is available on Netflix from Friday, June 16th