There have been a number of action-hero archetypes in film over the years. We’ve had your Glib Action Heroes — think Schwarzenegger and Willis in their heydays. We’ve also had Mythic Action Heroes, which range from Mad Max to most superheroes put on screen these days. But lately what we’ve seen more of than anything is the Sad Action Hero, the badass warrior who is too depressed to do anything other than murder a bunch of bad guys, and if he gets him or herself killed in the process, so what? Keanu Reeves’ John Wick is obviously this subgroup’s reigning king, but with the release of the first Extraction in 2020, Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake proved to be an exciting new addition to the Sad Action Hero canon.
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Produced and co-written by the Russo Brothers (architects of a handful of the best Marvel movies, including Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Infinity War) and directed by their long-time stunt coordinator, Sam Hargrave, Extraction was a B-movie blast — a throwback beat ’em up that found Hemsworth tearing through a crowded and corrupt South Asian city to rescue a kidnapped teenaged boy from a Bangladeshi drug lord. Though its “white savior” setup had some crying foul, Hargrave’s movie proved to be a great time for anyone looking for little more than thrilling action choreography and delightfully brutal fisticuffs. Now, three years later, Hemsworth is back in Extraction 2, a bigger, more expensive-looking sequel that sheds some of the first movie’s more problematic elements but also loses a lot of its down-and-dirty charm.

Image via Netflix

Extraction 2, directed once again by Hargrave with Joe Russo handling writing duties by himself, picks up immediately after the climax of the first film. Rake, a special-ops soldier turned mercenary who has never emotionally recovered from losing his young son to cancer, has seemingly died after completing his mission, getting riddled with gunfire, and falling off a bridge. Although, as that film’s final scene teased, Rake, in fact, has survived. To Extraction 2’s credit, it doesn’t just have Rake immediately and magically recover from his many serious injuries. Instead, we first see him in a deep coma that only his handler and lone friend Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) wants to give him a chance to fight through.

When he inevitably wakes up, he goes through months of physical therapy, eventually retiring to a small cabin where he can live out his days with his dog and chickens. However, you can’t keep a Sad Action Hero out of the field for long, and Rake is eventually visited by a stranger (Hemsworth’s Thor buddy Idris Elba) with a new mission … only this time it’s personal. It turns out Rake’s ex-wife’s sister is married to Davit, an Eastern European terrorist (what are the odds?), and she and her two kids are currently confined with Davit inside a Georgian prison. Rake is tasked with extracting them, a mission he is compelled to take on, as he still feels massive guilt for not being there for his own wife when his son died. As with the first movie, the extraction itself is only half the battle, as Rake then also has to escort the ex-sister-in-law and both kids to safety, which isn’t easy once Davit’s terrorist-leader brother, Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani), sends his entire army out to take down Rake and anyone else who gets in his way.

As far as set-ups go, it works well enough, and during its first 50 minutes, Extraction 2 gives fans of the original film everything they could ask for. In an attempt to surpass the continuous-action “oner” that proved to be a highlight of the first movie, Extraction 2’s prison break is shot and then digitally stitched together to look like the action all happens in a single take. It’s 21 minutes long and takes Rake from inside the prison during a full-on riot to an extended car chase to a moving train, where he battles not only armed terrorists but two circling attack helicopters. Even better, the camera leaves Hemsworth for a stretch during the sequence to instead track Farahani, an underrated contributor last time who gets to become a full-fledged action star this go-round. It’s all breathtakingly assembled, and though you know it’s aided by tons of digital trickery, the sequence still looks more realistic than anything you see in, say, Fast X. When the on-screen cut finally comes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Extraction 2 is the next-level sequel that fans were hoping for.

Image via Netflix

And then, sadly, things start to get off track. The action slows way down and the plot moves to Vienna, Austria, where Rake incorrectly assumes the family will now be safe. Instead, Zurab and his army soon follow, and, for a while, Extraction 2 bizarrely turns into a far-less-entertaining riff on Die Hard or maybe Mission: Impossible. Gone is the exotic urban environment of the first film and even the barren and wintry Georgian setting the new film had been utilizing. Instead, we get a long and much less impressive action sequence set in and around a tall skyscraper. It’s something we’ve seen done too many times, and it’s at this point that Extraction 2 starts to feel generic in a way that’s similar to too many other Netflix originals. Near the end of that sequence, Rake inexplicably fails to kill Zurab when he has the chance, setting up a final-act brawl inside a deserted church that feels both nondescript and a little too John Wick-esque. After a blistering opening half, Extraction 2 quickly just runs out of ideas.

Also not helping is the fact that neither the story nor the supporting characters are able to hold the viewer’s attention all that well in this sequel. The first Extraction was purposefully an impersonal film, highlighted by fleeting moments of humanity captured in the burgeoning friendship between Rake and the teenaged boy he rescues. Rake doesn’t even fight the main villain in the original movie; that job instead falls to Nik in a clever little aside that takes place after the climax of the film. The sequel, however, makes everything personal, which pushes it away from Extraction 1 into a space where the drama feels more conventional and, thus, more mundane. Rake is fighting for his family this time. Zurab is fighting for his brother. At a certain point, nothing seems to matter but these guys getting the chance to try to kill each other. And a lot of the first movie’s “a guy just doing his job” vibe gets lost along the way, as the movie morphs into a kind of revenge picture we’ve seen a million times before. Extraction 2 also tries to mine drama from one of the ex-sister-in-law’s kids, Sandro (Andro Jafaridze), who has been brainwashed by his father and uncle and must eventually choose whether to follow in their footsteps or protect his mother. His loyalty swings back and forth, and the character ultimately proves to be more frustrating than interesting.

Meanwhile, Elba briefly shows up for two quick scenes, the second of which only exists to vaguely suggest further sequels and a growing Extraction universe. (I may have groaned.) Nik’s brother, Yaz (Adam Bessa) has a much larger presence this time, although whether that was necessary can certainly be debated. True story: I rewatched the first Extraction the day before watching Extraction 2 and still didn’t recognize Yaz as someone we had already met. So his jump in importance is a bit jarring. You eventually yearn for the simplicity of the first film, when all you had to worry about was Rake and the kid he was rescuing, with a slight detour to allow for David Harbour to put in a few minutes of deft character-actor work. (Elba is a fine replacement for Harbour in theory, but it feels like he’s in more of a “do a friend a favor and then cash a check” mode.)

Sometimes action movies can earn a good reputation based on the strength of one particularly well-executed scene and Extraction 2’s prison heist may be enough to keep the film on the right side of genre history. The film also deserves props for elevating Farahani to a level where she’s positioned almost as an equal to the still-very-good Hemsworth, as opposed to just a briefly cool side character. But, in every other way, Extraction 2 feels like a glossier and more by-the-numbers extension of the first movie. By giving Rake, their Sad Action Hero, something more to fight for, the filmmakers accidentally stripped the character of what made him so compelling in the first place.

Rating: C+

Extraction 2 releases June 16 on Netflix.