Extraction

I have an old house without central air-conditioning.  Window air-conditioners are noisy and, therefore, when I watch TV, I usually engage the subtitles so that I can reliably understand the dialogue in the show that I am watching.  Sometimes, to improve my German, I will watch a show using subtitles in that language.  It was very hot and humid when I watched the Netflix original Extraction (2020) with the air conditioners in the room blasting out a cool breeze and so I watched the picture subtitled. The subtitles also indicate music and sound effects.  Thus:  [tense music playing], [grunts], [groans], [panting and groaning], [nose cracks], [groaning loudly]. [bone breaks]. etc -- I think you get the point.  

Chris Hemsworth, who produced the film and plays the hero, Tyler Rake, is a stoic, good-hearted, suicidal mercenary.  Grieving the loss of his six-year-old son to lymphoma, he has lost his desire to live and is willing to take risks that no one else would accept.  Thus, he is dispatched to Dhakar, a city in Bangladesh, to "extract" the son of an Indian mobster who has been kidnapped by rival gangsters.  The boy's father is in prison in Mumbai, although running his operations from that place, so he can't go himself to sort this out.  The Mumbai gangster's lieutenant, a family man named Saruj is told to recover the boy or his own family will be massacred.  Saruj hires Rake, who has a number of mercenary colleagues in his posse, to rescue the kid.  The movie is extremely simple -- in fact, the plot is so streamlined as to be either classically lean or moronic depending upon your taste for such things.  Rake goes to Dhakar, kills about a hundred bad guys and members of the local police who are helping the mobster who, apparently, runs the city.  After decimating both the enemy gang and the Dhakar constabulary, Rake and the boy are rescued from their hiding place in the Bangladesh sewer, described as "the filthiest sewer on the planet."  [gagging], [tense music]  By the midpoint in the movie, we learn that Saruj doesn't have enough money to pay Rake for his work and, now, is freelancing -- Saruj plans to kill Rake, something that is not readily accomplished, and bring the boy home himself.  Rake's rescuer has been corrupted by the 10 million dollar bounty on the kid and he tries to snatch him as well.  Rake kills his old Kandahar army buddy who rescued him from the sewer and goes on the run again, this time with the entire Bangladesh army chasing him.  All  checkpoints are blocked and Rake has to get the kid across the river -- apparently, India lies on the other side of the river although this isn't ever made very clear.  Saruj has now been enlisted as an ally, even though Rake and Saruj beat each other silly the day before.  Some helicopters get blown up and Rake with Saruj kill hundreds of anonymous Bangladesh cops and soldiers; they also gun down the head of the Bangladesh security services.  The kid gets extracted by helicopter.  Saruj and Rake are shot about fifty times before perishing.  Rake, in fact, is able to dive into the river, vanishing underwater so that a sequel to the picture (which has proven wildly popular) may be in the offing.  In fact, in the final shot, there's a suggestion that Rake is back in Mumbai, still in the land of the living.  

Here is the film's moral:  No one drowns by falling in the river.  You die by remaining submerged.  This piece of wisdom is illustrated three times:  Rake dives 100 feet into a picturesque lagoon at the start of the film and is shown resolutely squatting at the bottom of the pond; the kid dives into a pool in Mumbai, sits on the bottom for a half-minute, but decides to surface; of course, Rake dives off the bridge heaped with corpses and burning vehicles at the end of the movie.  The picture begins in media res with Rake slaughtering enemies on the bridge -- there is a flashback to "Sixteen hours earlier"to set up the action.  The picture has a classical five--part structure:  there's a prologue that dramatizes Rake's suicidal nihilism and the boy's kidnapping, then we have a protracted bloodbath and chase involving Rake's escape through Dhakar with the boy in tow (this involves fire-fights in tenements, on the roofs of houses, violent truck and car chases, and, finally, the escape into the sewer), there's an interlude in which Rake talks to his old army buddy (who will betray him) and the secondary hero Saruj is humanized by being shown talking on the phone to his own small son.  Act Four is a massacre on the city streets, more chases, and the blood bath on the bridge.  There's a short epilogue in which the boy chooses not to remain submerged and the implication that Rake has survived.  

The action is reasonably well-directed and there are some exciting long-takes of Rake driving vehicles through the crowded Dhakar streets and marketplaces while gunning down dozens of bad guys.  The gunfights often involve rapid fire through glass or vegetables (lots of melons and produce get murdered) and are staged after the manner of John Woo's action sequences.  This film will not do much for Dhakar's reputation as a tourist destination -- the city is filmed in a sepia and amber haze of smog so that the whole place looks like it's submerged in sewage.  Saruj's character is intended to appeal to Indian audiences (I'm not sure the teeming masses in Bangladesh get Netflix and so they can be slaughtered with impunity.).  He's heroic and keeps the film from devolving into hopeless racism:  one Australian dude kills five-hundred dimwitted Asians.  The film is an international co-production seemingly designed for Indian, Thai, and Chinese audiences as well as action fans in the U.S.,U.K., Europe and Australian.  The exotic locations were filmed in India and Thailand.  It's not clear to me that anything but drones were used in Bangladesh.  The movie's violence is so extreme as to be utterly implausible and the outcome is never seriously in doubt so there's no suspense -- if one guy can kill half of the army in Bangladesh, it seems pretty unlikely that anyone is going to stop his mission (particularly when he has lethal colleagues supporting him, including a very comely Indian lady sniper).  The film is stylish garbage.  It's also Netflix most popular recent release.