Tyler Rake has defeated death and has survived brutal combat in Bangladesh. He now spends his retirement in Austria only to be suddenly dragged into a mission by an unknown man to extract his wife’s sister and her two children from a prison in Georgia. With a new mission, and a personal one at hand, Rake now has an unknown reason to put his life in danger.

Reviews

1. Extraction is awesome. Extraction 2 is more awesome. I could feel it immediately. The story, characters and villain are all a step up. It’s intense and suspenseful throughout.But of course, we’re here for the action. And just like the rest of the movie, it jumps a level. It’s just as clear and well-shot as in the original. But it’s more creative, bigger and harder. It has one of the coolest, longest and most impressive simulated one-takes I’ve ever seen. I was mesmerized.

   The only criticism I have is that it’s anticlimactic. The best action scene happens early, second best happens in the middle, and the last action scene is the smallest (but still good). Other than that, I loved this movie.

   As someone who constantly trashes the inferior quality of Netflix original movies, I have to give them credit here. And as a huge fan of fight scenes and action movies, I’m ecstatic at the new levels I’ve seen from franchises like this and John Wick. There are still some movies with quick-cut shaky-cam fight scenes (like Snake Eyes and Mortal Kombat), but hopefully movies like Extraction can end those plagues forever. (1 viewing, 6/16/2023)

2. As usual, the fights are over the top (body armor may stop bullets, but the kinetic energy is still hammering into the body in real life). But I found the plot, the motives, the backstory all much more interesting in this movie than the first one. Also liked Idris Elba’s appearance. As seems to be the norm for this sort of movie, we got to see a variety of exotic firearms, from AKs with no stock to M240s and M249s to RPGs, PDWs, mini-guns, sniper weapons, etc. Also as usual, the weapons have extraordinary effect (not sure how you could get 40mm grenades to explode that close to the weapon that fired them) although hand-grenade explosions do seem to be close to accurate (the RPGs fly more like AT-4s though – RPGs don’t really fire that accurately). Lots of bangs, lots of bashing, lots of knives (and axes and shovels and pitchforks), lots of shooting… but the plot actually has a start and a finish (and an opportunity for another one).
3. Only recommended to those who just wanna watch a fierce, full on action movie, with fight after fight.Starter tip: skip the first 20 minutes of talking, action starts from 20 minutes onward.

   The good: the only redeeming feature of this movie is the (often, not always) terrific action photography. There are a few (about 3) long action sequences that could come straight out of a Mission Impossible movie. The same wow factor. Really impressive. There are lots of over the top special effects stunts that are out of whack. Nice!

   Too bad though that they didnt restrain themselves from using too much CGI, it would have even further enhanced some of these terrific action scenes. Mind you there is a lot (A LOT) of “filler” action as well, with shootouts that are NOT impressive in any way. Bummer.

   The bad: when there is no action though, this movie really fails. Big time. I mean, the characters are cardboard. The dialogues are cringeworthy. The whole story about Chris Hemsworth saving a mother and her 2 children is terrible, up to a level that I simply had to skip these ridiculous talking scenes, that only held up the action.

   Definitely not great as a whole, but worth one watch for (some of) the action spectacle scenes.