Extraction 2: Very Loud, Very Empty

After I finished the Russo Bros' 2023 sequel to their hit Netflix action thriller Extraction, I was trying to think of a simile that I could use to sum up my thoughts on Extraction II as a whole. The image that first came to my mind was that of a bird stuck in a metal garbage can. It flies around, causing a huge ruckus and getting a lot of attention, but not really getting anything done other than that. Such is the case with this movie. It's very loud, and it needs to be because there isn't much else going on in the world of Tyler Rake and his gang of almost comically violent cohorts. In keeping with the simile of the bird and the trash can, this film does so much on-screen without getting much of anything done narratively, it's almost impressive, in some ways. All the wrong ones, at that. So if you haven't been able to guess, I didn't like the movie. Now, don't get me wrong. As a guy, I love a good action film, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't even get a little bit of a kick out of watching Tyler blast through dozens of video-game-style enemies of varying difficulty, but I'm also a movie critic, and I want to give this film a fair shake, so despite this film's obvious technical prowess, I'm going to have to dock it major points in almost every other regard, and in this article, I want to get into the thick and thin of why.

Extraction II, a sequel to the 2020 military-based action thriller, once again follows Tyler Rake, a former special forces soldier, as he recuperates from a near-death experience from a past mission. However, his life is upended when he is hired to rescue a woman named Ketavan and her family from her ruthless crime lord husband in Eastern Europe.

OK, so as far as the good aspects of Extraction II go, the technical prowess of the film is unmistakable. The cinematography itself is crisp, and this lends a nice backdrop to the main piece in this film's arsenal: the impressive action sequences that are just as good as in the first Extraction. The creativity that is brought to bear in the many ways that Tyler slices, dices, shoots, and blasts his many enemies to bits is John-Wick-levels of unmistakable, and I found myself wishing for that same creativity to get carried over to the other parts of the film. If all you're looking for in a movie is to be entertained for two hours, Extraction II can do that for you. This film's focus is unmistakably and unapologetically on its action sequences and said sequences are one aspect of the film that the Russos and Co. knock out of the park. This film utilizes a lot of very cool and well-shot action scenes, using some unusual techniques that never let the camera wander and always keep you in the thick of non-stop combat sequences that are well beyond what we usually see in action films in terms of their overall quality, and if this film had caught me without my critic's notebook in hand, I could have easily seen myself checking out and just watching gun-go-pew-pew for two hours.

However, for as good as the fight staging is in this film, that's really all this movie has going on. No, I'm not exaggerating in any way when I say that. The plot of Extraction II is just about non-existent. The film is essentially two hours of Tyler running through shooting galleries of varying quality and difficulty. This aspect of the film got so bad at points that I really started to feel like the film was dragging, even when bullets were flying in all directions. You distinctly feel the gaps in this film's narrative flow as it jumps from setpiece to setpiece, and this is a tell-tale sign that the script was razor-thin and created far less with a story at heart and far more with money in mind. Either that or the writers legitimately couldn't think of any way to make their plot more interesting or, you know, existent in the first place. Now, that's not to say that nothing happens in this film. Of course, there's a conflict. Of course, there's character drama. Where do you think I'm getting my pre-review synopsis from? However, a lot of what happens in this film doesn't push it towards its climax in any way whatsoever. It's like the writers had a climax in mind and then just kind of let Tyler blow stuff up for a couple of hours until they could create an excuse to usher it in. Extraction II is barely thirty minutes of movie rattling around in a two-hour-sized container, and this is where the empty part of my review comes in. The loud part is what the filmmakers used to try and distract you from the fact that there's really a whole lot of nothing going on in this film.

As far as the characterization goes, even this aspect of the film is unimpressive. It's bland and often stereotypical, which is just uninspired and, to be entirely fair to Extraction II, probably to be expected in a film like it. This movie isn't looking to be a deep, character-driven drama, nor should it try to be. What it should have tried to do was earnestly make an attempt to make its characters something more than mere plot devices to create conflict that still doesn't come up as often as it should. Every character in this film feels more or less relegated to their role in the plot, and this was just uninspired on the part of the writers involved. There were a lot of opportunities for this film to build on its characters, and it just didn't, and I found myself more and more disappointed the more and more nothing this movie did. Now, there has been one criticism leveled against Extraction II by a lot of audience members that I actually have to disagree with and defend the film, at least on the level of their critiques: a lot of people complained about a character in the film named Sandavo and criticized him for making a lot of what they deemed to be poor decisions, as is characteristic of a lot of audience complaints. And as I was looking through these complaints, they made me realize that I could use Sandavo as a valuable learning experience here. As is always the case with talking points like this one, a lot of these logic-based attacks leveled at him had absolutely nothing to do with the overall plot of the film and should never have been brought up in the first place for the sake of intellectual honesty. People don't think like computers, nor should we expect them to. People make mistakes, and saying things like "this movie is bad because this character didn't X when he/she should have Y" is probably the most illegitimate form of criticism you could level at a movie, for one reason: complaints like this don't address the plot or the characterization of the film in any meaningful way, making them more or less completely irrelevant to the overall quality of the film's narrative. Attacks like this are meaningless, and I see them get used a lot by people who don't know how to critique a film in any way in an attempt to fill up white space on the page. If you want a case study of this effect I'm describing, go to any movie on Google, click on the user ratings, and filter the reviews by one star. OK, rant over, but I hope that from now on, if this is a habit of yours to do this, you won't anymore.

All of this said, there was one aspect of Extraction II that I kind of love, and that was the big skyscraper setpiece where Zurab the crime lord and his men go after Tyler and his team while our heroes take shelter in Tyler's skyscraper safehouse in Vienna. As I was watching all of this transpire, I couldn't help but note that the film would have been better served by making this skyscraper firefight the focus of the entire film instead of just relegating it to the role of a temporary setpiece. I know that sounds drastic, but hear me out: the skyscraper fight sequence is the only part of the film that ever felt like it was working towards an inevitable climax, even more so than the actual climax of the film. The entire sequence had genuine stakes to it, and started to leave me wondering how it would end. And in addition, the skyscraper is easily big enough to generate enough scenarios to make this film more than interesting, with more than enough different rooms and environments to create plenty of unique fight sequences and such. It would have made for a film of significantly higher quality, and if it had been combined with the Russo Brother's obvious command of fight choreography, we could have been in for a truly memorable and unique film had they chosen to set the whole thing around one setpiece that wasn't warring with other, less striking locations for attention. Of course, if the film wasn't willing to work on its characters, I can't say this new approach would have changed everything. But it would have changed some.

All in all, despite this film's obvious technical prowess, Extraction II is ultimately nothing more than a whole lot of sound reverberating over the top of a whole lot of nothingness, and it often felt like it was counting on winning brownie points from 30-year-old dudes who have a lot of strong opinions on movies and none of the know-how to justify their beliefs. It's loud and bombastic, but when you peel back the top layer, it's also extremely hollow and empty, and this is honestly really disappointing because there's a good movie somewhere here amidst all the noise, but Extraction II just didn't know how to slow down fast enough or kill it's darlings (slang term for cutting useless screenplay aspects the writer loves) often enough to find it. I had been looking forward to watching a dumb action movie for a while after a steady diet of critically acclaimed dramas, and after watching this film, I was reminded of why I had started watching almost nothing but critically acclaimed dramas. There's just no way to get around the fact that Extraction II is a bad and poorly written movie, and I found myself wishing that its ambition with its story matched its ambition with its setpieces because they're genuinely really awesome setpieces, and I wish that I didn't have to slap them with the label of empty noise. But there's just nothing going on here plot-wise, and no amount of whiz-bang-pow is going to be able to hide that from someone who's looking.

Extraction II - 4/10

James 4:1-3