It’s easy to get distracted when you’re watching a movie at home. Your doorbell rings. Your phone buzzes. Your baby cries. Your wife needs you to get her a snack. It happens. Sometimes all at once.
The biggest challenge for Netflix – and for streamers in general – is holding your attention and keeping your bum on that seat. At the cinema, having already dished out for tickets and an overpriced soda, a movie would need to be a special kind of hell for you to actually get up and walk out. At home, you just click out and move on to the next thing on your watch list.
I watch movies at home the same way I do at the multiplex. I dim the lights, put my phone on silent, and turn off the notifications on my smartwatch. I don’t stop for toilet breaks or to make a cup of tea. Once I press play, the only thing that interrupts my viewing experience is the occasional buffering of content.
Extraction was the first movie that I needed to pause.
About a half hour into the movie, Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake has successfully completed his mission, he’s rescued the kidnapped teenage son of a Mumbai drug lord and is heading toward the extraction point when everything goes to hell. Dragging the kid along with him, he turns around and races back to a nondescript Mercedes. They get in, and what follows is one of the finest action sequences ever put on film.
It is a car chase through the crowded streets of Dhaka, which then makes way to a foot pursuit inside a claustrophobic block of flats, to a brutal one-on-one knife fight out on the street, before ending with a flipped truck and a massive explosion. It is one glorious take. It is poetry in motion. The camera constantly moving, in and out, over and under, sideways and down. It is so cleverly paced that it knows exactly when to take a minute, to let you catch your breath, before throwing you off a building.
It is more than just a magnificent set piece. It is choreographed with such grace and precision that it drives the drama and progresses the plot. It is 12 perfect minutes of pure cinema.
Which is precisely why I needed to pause. Not because I needed a break, but so I could go back and watch it all over again.
Up until that point, I thought I was watching a thinly disguised remake of Sicario: Day of the Soldado. Extraction is, after all, riffing on very similar tropes: crime, corruption, and the perpetual state of violence that plagues some societies.
It was only after those 12 minutes that I realised I was watching something great. Not because of the mastery behind that one sequence, but because it didn’t exist in isolation. This wasn’t a movie that was anchored around a single moment. The thirty or so minutes leading up to that set piece told a story, established character, created conflict, and built the necessary tension. It did what all good screenplays should. It set us up.
Extraction is a complex film. A globetrotting actioner with no real good guys isn’t something that’s easy to pull off. But Sam Hargrave does. The first time director, who cut his teeth as a stunt coordinator on the last two Avengers movies, has clearly learnt a thing or two from the Russos. Just think about Captain America: The Winter Soldier and how it sets up each and every one of its key moments. Think about Community and those paintball episodes. One may be based on a superhero comic and the other a weekly sitcom, but both are exactly this sort of movie.
This is such an accomplished production, with none of the crutches that have become commonplace in action filmmaking. There are no hasty cuts, or shaky-cam fight scenes, or an over-reliance on CGI. You feel every punch and gunshot. You know where everyone is on screen at all times. But most of all, you give a damn about what happens with these people.
That’s because Hargrave doesn’t just rely on the leading man charm of Chris Hemsworth to get you invested in his character. Instead, he makes excellent use of the movie’s quiet moments to create depth, vulnerability, and emotional resonance. Every scene has stakes. So much so that a heated exchange between Hemsworth’s Rake and David Harbour’s Gaspar feels as intense and as weighty as any of the film’s action sequences.
Exactly a year ago, to the day, we were getting ready to see Chris Hemsworth in the last “sure thing” that Hollywood had to offer. Avengers: Endgame, which would go on to become the biggest movie of all time, earned the Russo brothers tremendous cache in Hollywood. And I for one am glad that they’re using that capital to make old-school movies like Extraction and 21 Bridges.
Extraction is an old-fashioned movie. It feels physical. It feels real. It has a protagonist we can root for, with action that just doesn’t quit, and a narrative that keeps us invested throughout. It’s the perfect summer blockbuster for a summer without blockbusters.
Extraction
Netflix
117 minutes
Director: Sam Hargrave
Writer: Joe Russo
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Manoj Bajpayee, Randeep Hooda, Priyanshu Painyuli, Pankaj Tripathi, Derek Luke, Marc Donato, and David Harbour
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