Extrac­tion

Rid­ing roughshod on the suc­cess of their var­i­ous Mar­vel Stu­dios super­hero behe­moths, Joe Rus­so (one half of the Rus­so broth­ers) has man­aged to sell on a script which feels like some­thing he fished out of the bot­tom of a draw that’s very low to the ground on account of the fact that he doesn’t use it very often.

This is boil­er­plate shoot-em-up filler that plays like Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire meets The Wild Geese, as Chris Hemsworth (resem­bling a mighty oak with four more mighty oaks attached as limbs) is soused mer­ce­nary Tyler Rake (sic) who, for rea­sons unclear, takes on a lethal mis­sion to re-cap­ture the kid­napped teenage son of an impris­oned Indi­an drug lord from his main Bangladeshi rival.

On paper, as is so often the case, this should be total cake­walk and mon­ey in the bank, as the kid is being held cap­tive by a bunch of den­tal­ly chal­lenged goons with few brains and few­er round of ammo. Yet when he’s just about to exe­cute his vic­to­ry line shim­my, every­thing goes south and Tyler has to retool and dive straight back into the viper’s nest and take on the seem­ing­ly infi­nite artillery pow­er of mur­der­ous dandy Amir Asif (Priyan­shu Painyuli).

Direct­ed with lit­tle denot­ing a per­son­al touch by long-serv­ing stunt co-ordi­na­tor Sam Har­grave, Extrac­tion boasts as its cen­tre­piece a dig­i­tal­ly ren­dered ​“sin­gle take” car chase which segues into a gun bat­tled which segues into a knife fight and then back into a car chase.

Maybe it’s the fact that every mod­er­ate­ly bud­get­ed action movie is now required by law to con­tain an emp­ty dis­play of for­mal the­atrics to give the crit­ics some­thing to sali­vate over, but we’ve now reached the point where we need to march these long takes behind the back of the barn and put one in the brain.

Hemsworth coasts as the omnipo­tent rip­pling spunk who is so good at not get­ting killed that he drains the film of any threat or dra­ma (see also John Wick). The strange con­trast of a lengthy, whis­pered heart-to-heart between Tyler and his mark, Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaisw­al), is a naked attempt to cov­er all the char­ac­ter stuff in one bulk ses­sion, appar­ent­ly sat­ing the slather­ing audience’s appetite for scads of tedious, bul­let-based carnage.

Mean­while Dha­ka is made to look suit­ably anony­mous (much of the film was shot in Thai­land), and the only visu­al sign­post that we’re in Bangladesh is that every­thing is shot through urine-tinged filters.