Supervised and conceived by the Russo brothers of Marvel, the “Extraction” films are an example of a dwindling race: the big-budget and super-powered adventure. Whether the main character’s name is John Rambo, Jason Bourne or John Wick, he is a variant of a type: the prolific finisher who would rather not finish anymore, but is repelled again and again. He has a tragic past and is grieving about it. And he is played by a guy who is so powered in powered scenes that one might think he could take 100 shots to the head, face and torso, as well as a shot, a knife wound and a grenade concussion and move on.
Critic Robert Brian Taylor calls these films part of the ” Sad canon of action heroes.”Chris Hemsworth is his most outstanding new member. He plays Tyler Rake-a boy’s idea for an action hero name, but Hemsworth makes him look almost like a real person. He’s a great body actor, maybe as good as Schwarzenegger and Stallone in their bounties, but with more reach. He played a fascinating male bimbo, a legendary hacker, a depressed mercenary, a 19th-century whaler. He also has a bit of the deliberate swagger of the young Sean Connery. But there is also a sadness buried in him, and this is what the “Extraction” films dig up.
Tyler was a special forces soldier in the Australian Army. He decided to go to Afghanistan for another term of service, since his son was action an incurable issue and was not present when the boy died. Then his marriage broke up, and he became a mercenary. Feelings of guilt related to marital and parental failure are as much a driver of the “Extraction” franchise as amnesia in the “Bourne” films and grief in the “John Wick” series. Tyler’s adventures are redemption stories set in action movie purgatory full of ghost versions of the hero: flawed fathers who mistreat, neglect, or misrepresent their children, seeing them as an extension of their ego or brand. Tyler’s main enemies are dark parents who could replace Tyler’s own masochistic feelings about the severity of his failure towards his family.
The first “extraction” showed how Tyler saved the kidnapped son of an Indian medicine lord, who was being held in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The kid was a peasant in a piss match between rich blanks and private armies. When Tyler accepted the mission, he offered himself as a karmic punching bag and absorbed the punishment for his past mistakes in an urban inferno-purgatory (in the original graphic novel, the setting was Paraguay), while serving as a quasi-father figure to the boy he was protecting. In it, an unnamed man (Idris Elba, so charming that it is hoped that he will be in the third) appears at the hut in the forest, where Tyler is recovering from the previous mission and delivers a message from his ex-wife, who is ultimately Georgian. Her sister and her children are being held in a Georgian cage by their medicine dealer Davit (Tornike Bziava), who had the influence to get them all to settle down with him. Rake is hired to get the family out of cage and keep them away from Davit and his brother Zurab( Tornike Gogrichiani), who is even more psychopathic. Complications follow. All you need to know is that the movie consists of three long action sequences with a little character development.