Extraction by rake makes for violent thrills

CHRIS HEMSWORTH gets to use his own accent and say “mate” a lot in this nuts action thriller directed, unsurprisingly, by a top stunt coordinator, Sam Hargrave, who has worked on multiple Marvel films.

Hemsworth stars as Tyler Rake, an Aussie black ops mercenary presumably forced to enter that line of work because he is named Tyler Rake. People named “Tyler Rake” don’t become accountants.

Rake is so haunted by personal loss that he readily accepts the more suicidal jobs that other mercs turn down, the latest being the retrieval of Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the teenage son of an incarcerated Indian drug lord who has been kidnapped by his father’s Bangaladeshi rival, the ruthless Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli).

Rake’s extraction of Ovi from Dhaka in Bangladesh goes awry and Asif sets about ensuring the pair never escape the city, sending seemingly every member of the local military, police and criminal underworld after them.

It’s become a cliche to say that a movie feels like a video game but the prolonged, nimbly-shot action sequences that comprise most of

Extraction can’t help but evoke the bullet-riddled intensity of shoot’em-up games like Call of Duty. The more intimate, hand-to-hand action sequences bring to mind the screen-shaking camera work of Gareth Evans’ The Raid.

While the amount of carnage on display is relentless and alarming — Rake makes Rambo look like a pacifist — you wouldn’t necessarily say the film fetishises the gunplay. It’s grimly entertaining. The effort to provide Hemsworth’s character with an emotional arc is cursory but nevertheless somewhat effective. At one point Rake actually kills a dude by smooshing his head into

. . . a rake. An Extraction sequel is already being planned. I will be watching it.