Extraction Review

Netflix has finally delivered on their promise of making a solid B action movie. After numerous over- and underproduced pictures like "6 Underground" and "Triple Frontier," the streaming service drops "Extraction" on the quarantined audience with a bang that hardly stops until the credits roll.

Chris Hemsworth stars as Tyler Rake, and don't bother making jokes about the name as the film takes care of that for you. He's a mercenary who takes a job extracting, pun intended, the son of a jailed drug lord in India. What follows is purely perfunctory series of double-crosses, revelations, you know, the usual. He has the body and the face for a picture like this, the kind of film he has avoided until now, the "one-man army action extravaganza," the kind Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone used to deliver. Whether or not those kind of flicks are profitable today is irrelevant with places like Netflix, where cinema can succeed when it may otherwise bomb in theaters.

What else are people to watch? There is no doubt an appetite for this kind of movie (I mean, they keep making them), but when we get a pretty good one like "Extraction," it deserves particular praise. What it lacks in plot, character, or even purpose it makes up for with ruthless violence, filmed and edited so that you can easily follow along. The hand-to-hand combat is especially noteworthy, with the actors moving with angry grace, like a testosterone ballet complete with blood squirts and broken bones.

The highlight is an extended "continuous-shot" that moves from cramped tenements to the crowded streets before climaxing with a car chase; art this is not, but it is obvious that first time director Sam Hargrave and his team were not interested in settling for making just "another action movie." There is a sense of fun despite its serious tone, and even Thor himself appears to be enjoying playing someone who isn't completely dense.

Shot on location in India, Thailand and Bangladesh, according to our friend the internet, there is the unfortunate side effect of painting these foreign locals as slums populated only by crime and drugs. Where women exist for visual splendor in the local club, and kids are recruited into brutality. In fact we witness numerous moments of kids attacking hero Tyler with guns, knives and fists; the filmmakers know what's tasteless and has no problems exploiting it for the sake of adding some variety to the violence.

You could pick any random scene here and quickly find its cinematic inspiration, but at an efficient 117 minutes, you barely have time to stuff a handful of popcorn in your mouth before more fisticuffs or gunplay break out. "Extraction" delivers the goods with a little bit more, but nothing less, than what it promises.

Sea Fever Review

We're not halfway into 2020, and we already have another aquatic creature-feature. First was January's "Underwater," which ripped off "Alien" and then dunked it into the ocean, and now we have "Sea Fever," which riffs on 1982's "The Thing." Only it's a smaller, more intimate affair in cinematic exploitation.

"Sea Fever" doesn't have many ideas that are it's own, and what it doesn't steal from John Carpenter's gory shocker it lifts from, what else, "Alien." But by debuting outside of the theater due to quarantine, this pandemic-at-sea thriller is a comfortable way to pass an afternoon.

Hermione Corfield stars as a very redheaded Siobhan, who joins a fishing barge to study abnormalities in their catch for class credits. (And yes, her hair color really does matter to the crew of the ship.) She doesn't fit in when we first find here in the lab, and she struggles to find her social place once aboard the craft; she consumes herself in her work. But soon something latches to the underside of the vessel, and a few mandatory monster-movie moments later, the mass beneath the boat disappears, but not before exposing everyone to a mysterious infection.

For all it's influences, a lot of the fat is trimmed from those earlier pictures, with a primary cast of just seven and very few occasions of people standing around talking about how to deal with the situation; once an idea is brought up, it's either immediately shot down or performed. This is a very lean series of unadulterated execution.

There is not much gore, save for one brief gruesome death, and wisely there are no jump or false scares. Director Neasa Hardiman does a decent job avoiding the most obvious cliches, as well as at creating a claustrophobic environment for the unmagnificent seven to exist in. But this is clearly an economically budgeted production, and she struggles finding the film it's own personality. You can see the ending from a mile away, as well the general order of deaths. And every time an old idea is recycled into something with a spark of creativity, it settles on established genre-expectations without enough exploration.

"Sea Fever" is timely but ultimately undemanding and underwhelming. No one may be able to hear you scream, but everyone can see your inspiration.

Coffee & Kareem Review

Netflix is at it again, releasing another action cop comedy about a month off the heels of "Spencer Confidential." But social distancing proves to be working in their favor, as people can't head to the theaters to watch competent and decent films, they stay home and watch something like "Coffee & Kareem."

Ed Helms stars as James Coffee, a mild-mannered cop who's frequenting Vanessa (Taraji P. Henson). The two hide it from her son Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh), who ends up catching them during a particular moment of intimacy (a thoroughly unsexy and unfunny moment, I might add). Kareem, an aspiring rapper, gets a hold of a local criminal (every town has one), hoping to scare Coffee away from his mom. Things go wrong (gasp) and now Coffee and Kareem find themselves on the run from the local Detroit police and the crooks, who may or may not be working together (second gasp!).

It is certainly a lot better than last years repugnant "Shaft," and although that isn't much of an endorsement, at least you don't feel like you need a shower and a fiber supplement to cleanse your body inside and out.

To save you from watching the direct-to-streaming, eighty eight minute long film, it goes pretty much like this: bang bang, swear word, corrupt cops, racial joke, another racial joke, more bang bang, now homophobic joke, another corrupt cop, one last bang bang and then ends with a message about accepting one another as a family. Oh, then there are clean cops by the time the credits scroll, as if the film didn't want to send the message that all men and women in uniform are bought out by drugs, but has no trouble being bigoted.

If it all sounds trite, that's because it is. There isn't a moment that surprised me, no one plot twist that caught me off guard, and a whole lot of tasteless jokes that feel ripped straight from a Youtube comment section for a better movie. The film handles race with particular stumbling, never sure how to handle the racial dichotomy between the Kareem and the very white Coffee, and settles for stereotypes. The two almost have a chemistry, but it ultimately boils down to the titular duo just trading insults. In one rare moment of tenderness, the kid opens up to his mother's boyfriend about being awkward around girls. It's almost sweet, until you remember it takes place in a stripclub and Kareem is twelve.

But there isn't anything us viewers can do; we can't leave our homes, and the allure of watching an all-new movie is just all too tempting. It even has several well-known actors and actresses! It features a familiar premise with the promise that this time the genre has some new tricks. But it is a lie, and the only thing us customers can do is write mean things about it online.