2023, Sam Hargrave (Extraction) - Netflix
I was really looking forward to this sequel, actually hinging on that final scene in the first movie where we see a blurry image of Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth, Ghostbusters) on the edge of swimming pool, seemingly returning to connect with Ovi, the boy who's life he saved, after miraculously surviving the kill shot on the bridge.
Alas, this sequel forgets all about that scene and picks almost immediately after the fall from the bridge. Instead of proceeding from the above scene, which was 8 months later, we visit those months of recovery and self-doubt and recuperation after they pull him from the river, isolated in a cabin in rural Austria (It's almost like someone made a typo in the script, and instead of him returning to his cabin in rural Australia, he ends up here. "But Mr. Hargrave, we already have the winter cabin by the lake built and all the production staff hired!!").
Rake is a bit of a whiney boy (or Sad Action Hero, as the trope calls it) who requires external validation that he is needed, before finding motivation. In the first, he had his best friend and handler Nikki Khan (Golshifteh Farahani, The Night Eats the World) pull him into a job to save a boy, a reflection on the son he couldn't save. This time he is approached to save his sister-in-law, and her children, from the prison where they are kept with her crime boss husband, in Georgia - the country not the American state. This request comes via a mysterious handler Alcott (Idris Elba, Luther) at the behest of Rake's ex-wife Mia (Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace). It works and gets Rake off his crutches and out into the Austrian cold for a work-out recovery montage.
That bit, Elba's character, is kind of out place, but I guess he is still just happy with collecting a paycheck from playing tertiary characters? The role seems more one of those Doing a Friend a Favour roles than anything. Reminds me of his toss-away role in the Ghost Rider movie.
The remainder of the movie can be broken down into the three major action sequences. The first, the actual extraction from the prison in Georgia, is the selling point, the (now) signature Hargrave stitched-together "single-take" chase from a prison to a train to an industrial complex in a forest. The next moves us to an Austrian skyscraper, and the final, a church in Georgia. I don't really have anything to say about this particular movie's plot but comment on the sequences, especially the first, which was just another of Hargrave's experiments on singular flows of continuity, which is obviously why the Russo Bros (producers) chose him for these movies. They are beautiful ballets of ultra-violence, a playground for the action-figure character of Rake to move through. There are prison yard riots, gauntlet runs through tunnels, a train fight and a vehicle chase through a blue-tinted forest, as Hargrave chases the violence around with a camera strapped to his chest, swinging in, around, over and often through the shots.
The plot, as if it mattered, loses a bit in comparison to the first, by expanding scope. I usually prefer my romps in ultra-violence contained to a few players (Wick being the exception), and by expanding Rake's extraction to a greater team of disposable black-suited support, who slowly diminish, we are supposed to understand the greater import to it all... or is it just more people to be shot/blown-up by the countless black-suited henchfolk on the Bad Guy's side?
I want to see a movie that shows us the recruiting & training company for these black-suited henchfolk. I know it was been explored in comics and animation, but a proper movie that sets up a counter-organization to all these well-funded mercenary outfits and espionage agencies, providing semi-well-trained soldiers prepared to die for whatever megalomanic needs to hire them.
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