Tyler Rake is, in essence, one huge scar with muscles.
That scarring is decidedly mental, in part. His rough-edged military and paramilitary experiences have inundated his adult life with a flood of merciless and often bloody destruction. And that takes its toll on one’s soul. Tyler has found that drugs and alcohol have no chance of planing off that knotted cicatrice.
Then there’s the actual physical scarring. And there’s plenty of that to be traced like a fleshy roadmap on his body, too. In fact, at the end of his last mission he was shot and sent cartwheeling off a bridge. And though rescued, he languished in a deathlike coma for months.
Now, Tyler is little more than a hobbling shell of a man who has to learn to walk again. He couldn’t lift and shoot a gun if his life depended on it. He still has muscles. They’re just much smaller. And they have pretty much turned their sinewy backs on anything his brain is telling them to do.
Fortunately, Tyler has a few friends left. His fellow mercenary/ handler, Nik, is one. She sets him up in a cabin off in a snowy wood with everything he needs to recover. Well, almost everything: He still needs a purpose. A reason to even bother.
Then, weeks later, he gets one.
A mysterious figure shows up at his cabin unannounced. He’s probably from some intelligence agency somewhere in the world, but he doesn’t share. Nor does he give his name. But he does hand Tyler a message—and a mission—from his ex-wife, Mia.
They are no longer on speaking terms, but Tyler is the only man she believes can do what she needs. You see, Mia’s sister is being held in a Georgian prison somewhere near the Russian border. She’s being kept captive because her husband, Davit, is imprisoned there. He’s part of the powerful Nagazi gang, a billion-dollar heroin and weapons operation.
Davit may not have the clout to get out of the high-security prison, but he can easily have his wife and children kept there with him.
Mia wants them rescued.
And, frankly, Tyler owes Mia for his past actions. He owes her big time. Tyler now has his reason. All he has to do is whip his muscles back into submission. Scars and all, that, he knows how to do.
Tyler and his crew of hired mercenaries head into a nearly impossible situation to save his former sister-n-law and her two children. And though the mission appears hopeless, the mercenaries all put their lives on the line to accomplish it. Many die in the process.
Tyler also wrestles with his guilt over walking away from Mia during a painful family experience in the past. He eventually has a chance to apologize and admit his failing openly.
Tyler also comes to a point of decision about his dear compatriot, Nik, willing to give up his life in exchange for hers. He also refuses to hurt a young teen, instead, once again, stepping up to honorably take the pain in the boy’s place.
Davit’s brother, Zurab, is the primary antagonist of this story. He’s an angry, vengeful sort who cares nothing about spiritual things. But he uses spiritual words to influence others. For instance, he tells his thuggish men that “by God’s law” Tyler “must die!”
He doesn’t, however, allow anyone else to use spiritual words to influence him. When one of his fellow Nagazi members reads from the Quran in an attempt to get Zurab to step away from his rage, Zurab shoots him and coldly watches him bleed out on the book.
Tyler exchanges some lightly sexual and snarky quips with Nik’s brother, Yaz.
There is a story here. But frankly, there’s only enough dialogue to set up the central conflict and its ongoing management. That’s because this is an action film and little else. And that action is primarily explosive, deadly and bloody. Creatively lissome, for sure, but brutally gruesome nonetheless.
In the heat of dance-like military fights, people are shot and stabbed by the scores in large rooms and areas (such as a crowded prison yard) and small rooms (such as bedrooms and hallways). Throats get slashed and jugulars stabbed, releasing geysers of blood. Combatants are also stabbed repeatedly in the legs, arms and backs.
We see people thrown off high precipices; impaled with knives, pipes and metal shards; riddled with bullets while running on top of a train; run over by speeding vehicles and bashed off motorcycles and ATV’s; hurled down through glass rooftops.
A man’s neck is broken when he’s slammed face first on a running tread mill. Another is crushed by a weight machine. Etc. A large guy with an axe chases small children. And that family group is sent to tumble painfully around in crashing vehicles and rail car explosions. They are constantly ducking the spray of large caliber automatic gun fire. People also fight with hammers, screwdrivers, boxes of nails and whatever other implements of carnage they can lay their hands on.
Explosions roar. Planes, trains, helicopters and vehicles of every size detonate courtesy of plastic explosives, grenade launchers and RPGs. Police vehicles get turned aside and crumpled like toys by powerful military weaponry.
Of course, then we’re led to the pain that Tyler, Nik, Yaz and Zurab endure through the course of things. These individuals, in particular, must hypothetically come equipped with at least two to three times the average human blood capacity. Because all of them are regularly shot or stabbed and bleeding profusely. They get up, wrap the gushing wound with a torn swath of cloth and push on. In fact, one of their bloody and broken number keeps going and going—sporting knife wounds, gunshots and broken bones—until he is finally finished with a bullet to the temple. (But who knows, there are always sequels.)
F- and s-words, some 10 apiece, are scattered throughout the dialogue. “P-ss off!” is heard once or twice as well.
We see Tyler with a couple empty beer bottles on a table near him. The mysterious visitor swigs a full bottle of beer in several gulps.
None.
Well-crafted action movies can be a guilty pleasure. They package one part high-octane action with one part visceral violence that’s both bloody and foul. Thus, the pleasure … and the guilt.
Extraction 2, like the original Extraction before it, rings the bell on all those fronts.
This Chris Hemsworth sequel is chock-full of incredible action that’s impeccably choreographed. Its frenetic scenes careen forward like a goaded-but-graceful rhino. However, they also rattle you with f-bombs and splash you with every a torn-open artery. This R-rated action flick bleeds … a lot.
Guilty-pleasure confessions aside, those messy areas should give us pause. Because it’s one thing to revel in explosive spectacle, but it’s quite another to whoop it up over two hours of artfully shaped profane carnage.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
