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.