Chris Hemsworth gets to use his own accent and say "mate" a lot in this nuts action thriller directed, unsurprisingly, by a top stunt co-ordinator, Sam Hargrave, who has worked on multiple Marvel films.
Hemsworth stars as Tyler Rake, an Aussie black ops mercenary presumably forced to enter that line of work because he is named Tyler Rake. People named "Tyler Rake" don't become accountants. Rake is so haunted by personal loss that he readily accepts the more suicidal jobs that other mercs turn down, the latest being the retrieval of Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the teenage son of an incarcerated Indian drug-lord who has been kidnapped by his father's Bangaladeshi rival, the ruthless Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli).
Rake's extraction of Ovi from Dhaka in Bangladesh naturally goes awry, and Asif sets about ensuring the pair never escapes the city by sending seemingly every member of the local military, police and criminal underworld after them.
It's become a cliché to say that a movie feels like a video game, but the prolonged, nimbly-shot action sequences that comprise most of Extraction can't help but evoke the bullet-riddled intensity of shoot-'em-up games like Call of Duty. The more intimate, hand-to-hand action sequences beneficially bring to mind the screen-shaking camera work of Gareth Evans' The Raid.
While the sheer amount of carnage on display is relentless and alarming – Rake makes Rambo look like a pacifist - you wouldn't necessarily say the film fetishises the gunplay. It's a grimly entertaining viewing experience.
