If Chris Hemsworth is hoping to establish himself as a major movie star beyond his work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the generic Netflix action movie Extraction is not a great place to start. It may seem promising for Hemsworth to once again team with key MCU veterans, including Joe and Anthony Russo, and stunt coordinator Sam Hargrave, in his directorial debut, but Extraction doesn’t showcase the main talents that those creators bring to their previous work. It feels more like the kind of movie Gerard Butler would make in between entries in the Has Fallen series.
Based on the 2014 Oni Press miniseries Ciudad, conceived by the Russo and Ande Parks, and written by Parks and illustrated by Fernando Leon Gonzalez, Extraction doesn’t take much from the comic, which was set in Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este and told the story of mercenary Tyler Rake rescuing a kidnapped young woman. Extraction keeps Tyler (Hemsworth) as its main character, but Joe Russo's screenplay is set in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Tyler’s charge is a boy named Ovi Mahajan (Rudhraksh Jaiswal).
Ovi is the son of a drug kingpin just over the border, in Mumbai, India, who's kidnapped by rival crime lord Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli), referred to as “Dhaka’s very own Pablo Escobar.” Ovi’s father is in prison, so his right-hand man, Saju (Randeep Hooda), takes responsibility, and hires Tyler through intermediaries to rescue the kid. We know Tyler is the real deal, because Ovi’s dad tells Saju to recruit an army, and instead Saju hires Tyler.
Introduced cliff-diving in the Kimberley in Australia, Tyler is the kind of ridiculous action hero who lives in a shack full of chickens but can take down a dozen machine gun-wielding bad guys in less than a minute. He takes the job because, as he says, he needs the money. However, anyone who’s seen an action movie knows Tyler will come to care deeply about Ovi and risk his own life to save the kid.
Russo and Hargrave give Tyler a rudimentary back story through repeated hazy flashbacks of a wife and/or kid, and he has one completely unconvincing heart-to-heart conversation with Ovi in which he delivers the necessary exposition about his emotional trauma. Otherwise, though, Tyler barely speaks, and he’s more like a grim-faced tank rolling over an endless stream of anonymous henchmen, sent out both by Asif (who seems to have literally every police officer on his payroll) and by Saju in a confusing attempt at double-crossing.
Asif orders every route out of the city closed, turning Extraction into a sort of reverse version of 21 Bridges, starring Hemsworth’s MCU colleague Chadwick Boseman. That just means Tyler has to shoot pretty much every person in his path, although he demonstrates a supposed moral code by only punching and kicking Asif’s underage recruits, and not killing them. Asif is the kind of movie villain who makes a point by throwing one of his underlings off a roof, and because Ovi’s dad only shows up in a single scene, there’s no reason to care about their ill-defined rivalry.
That leaves Saju as the default bad guy, although, like Tyler, he gets a single heartstring-tugging scene of family connections that’s meant to humanize him while he goes around killing everybody. In a bit of Netflix synergy, Stranger Things’ David Harbour shows up briefly as a rival mercenary, but the theoretical thrill of seeing Thor fight Hellboy is pretty underwhelming onscreen.
Hargrave, who’s worked as a stunt coordinator and performer on superhero movies for more than a decade, seems to be aiming for the career trajectory of John Wick directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, and he stages an epic 12-minute long-take car/foot chase in the middle of the movie that is distractingly showy. While Leitch used a similar long take to breathtaking effect in Atomic Blonde (for which Hargrave was part of the stunt team), Hargrave doesn’t demonstrate the same creativity, just repeating the same basic beats for the entirety of the sequence. The movie has a monochrome beige color palette that stands in contrast to the bright MCU movies and to the cool neon colors of Stahelski and Leitch’s best work.
Hemsworth is a charismatic performer who can do more than play Thor, and he’s shown off his comedic abilities both in his more recent MCU appearances and in his underrated performance in 2016’s Ghostbusters. But Extraction doesn’t play to any of his strengths except for literal physical strength. He shows off impressively sculpted muscles, but the character he plays might as well be a statue.
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda, Golshifteh Farahani, Priyanshu Painyuli and David Harbour, Extraction premieres Friday on Netflix.