'Extraction 2' might be dumb as a bag of hammers, but it's fun

Following his bloody odyssey through the streets of Dhaka, Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) manages to somehow survive his life-threatening wounds and is retired from his mercenary life. That's until a mysterious agent (Idris Elba) arrives and offers him a job he can't refuse - break his sister-in-law and children out of a Georgian prison who have been placed there by a merciless Georgian gangster - who just happens to be wife and father to them...

'Extraction 2' is a movie that requires about as little introduction or context needed. You don't really need to have watched the first one to get the complexities of the character because there really isn't one there. Hemsworth's Tyler Rake is essentially an unstoppable killing machine, hired as a professional mercenary, and sent into situations that would otherwise require a small army to rectify. When he's not killing goons with gym weights or shooting down helicopters, Hemsworth's character sits broodingly in a wooden cabin and chops wood.

Chances are if this was made in the '80s and starred a certain Austrian-American politician or a noted Italian-American art collector, this might be considered a cult classic by now. Yet, since we live in the age of endless content churn, 'Extraction 2' is robbed of any kind of purchase. It's going to sit on Netflix for a few weeks, you'll probably see a content farm crank out a story about how it's been watched a bajillion times, and then there'll be a third movie in a couple of years' time. This is a bit of a shame, because 'Extraction 2' is good fun when it's going ninety miles an hour with its hair on fire.

Sam Hargrave has upped his skillset since the first one, leaning more heavily into the staging and editing work to bring about more cleanly directed sequences. Indeed, the pedantic among you can probably spot the transitions in a twenty-odd minute oner that sees Hemsworth leading a mother and two children out of a Georgian prison, through a car chase, and eventually onto a speeding train that then gets attacked by helicopter gunships. After that, you've got a pensive scene between Hemsworth and Olga Kurylenko that, sadly, points out his lack of convincing emotion on screen. After that, though, it charges right on through to the end where it's set up as cleanly as possible for a third one.

Again, you're not really here watching this movie for anything other than the action. Compared to 'John Wick 4', 'Extraction 2' has far less style and panache. There is very little lighting or cinematography that stands out in the way that other movies of this ilk have. Instead, the focus is on the editing and choreography - both of which really are top-quality stuff. Hemsworth is able to throw stuntpeople around the screen with ease like he's a superhero, Hargrave's camera zips and zooms around the action in tight lines and there's a clear sense of geography in each beat.

'Extraction 2' is, unfortunately, kind of humourless and takes itself far, far too seriously to be truly fun. Hemsworth battles and grinds his way through the fight sequences with real intensity, but nobody really looks or seems like they're enjoying themselves. Compared to something like 'Lost Bullet' or 'The Raid', the action doesn't have the same tactile feeling and the stakes feel decidedly less serious. Hemsworth's character is, after all, an unstoppable killing machine and seeing as how he was brought back from the dead at the start of this, it's more or less a given that he's going to survive this one too.

If you come to 'Extraction 2' with lowered expectations - basically, watch Chris Hemsworth go on a killstreak rampage for two-ish hours - you'll have a good enough time with this.