Extraction

There's no two ways about it; Extraction is too long. On the plus side, it's violent yet painless. It gives us a fly-on-the-wall view of the action; at the same time, the over-the-shoulder third-person perspective assures us that what we have here is little more than videogame violence (except on two occasions, and even then we might give the film the benefit of the doubt, if we're feeling generous). Extraction has a sound premise and lots of action pieces to go with it; highlights include an ingeniously shot high speed chase that keeps us on the edge of the (back)seat, and a brutal, close quarters, hand-to-hand combat between Chris Hemsworth and Randeep Hooda. There is another, much less impressive fight, however. The villain employs children and teenagers as street soldiers, and there is a scene where they corner Hemsworth in an alley, and our hero, in a very un-heroic moment, proceeds to beat the crap out of them. Technically, this sequence is not gratuitous; it's actually there for a reason. The problem is that the ending somehow seems to simultaneously justify and negate that reason. The other time Extraction goes too far is when the Child in the 'Badass and Child Duo' is forced to shoot David Harbour's character dead. The rationale is that he does it to save Hemsworth's life, but this doesn't stand up under scrutiny. At a certain point Hemsworth and the kid are picked up by Harbour, an old friend and former comrade-in-arms of the former, who hides them in his house. From the moment this character is introduced we know, because we've seen it in countless other action movies, that sooner rather than later he's going to betray the hero, so we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's bad enough to have a teenager pull the trigger, but doing it in the name of such a tired cliché is inexcusable. Moreover, Harbor's character and everything that has to do him should have been dropped altogether, because his introduction at the halfway point results in a slump from which Extraction only recovers half an hour later when a rocket sends a helicopter into a tailspin (at least it got my attention back). This film is the directorial debut for Sam Hargrave, who would do well to study David Mamet's Spartan or Steven Soderbergh's Haywire for two textbook examples of economical action movies. We don't really care much about the hero's past; what we want is to see him rescue the boy and get him to safety in the most entertaining and expeditious way possible – straight to the point, without beating around the bush. Now, if the filmmakers feel it necessary for him to bond emotionally with the boy, then let him do it on the go, over the course of their adventure. There is within Extraction a serviceable action movie that its creators have almost ruined by trying to stretch it beyond the limitations of its genre.