Extraction
1 THE ONER
John Nugent: It was heavily trailed by Netflix, and came with much bluster and some hyperbole (“the best Oner we’ve ever seen”, raved the Russo Brothers on Twitter). But this might be the rare case of hype being justified. The 12-minute sequence, in which the camera seemingly never cuts (though there are hidden edits, masked by CGI), staged across apartments, balconies, bustling streets and inside moving vehicles, is the film’s audacious highlight. Kudos to Sam Hargrave: you won’t find many directors ready to strap themselves to the front of a car travelling at 60 miles an hour.
Sam Hargrave: The impetus was to have the audience experience this crazy action scene, but you’re also feeling the connection between Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) and Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) start to grow — through action, you bring these two characters together. The intention was for audiences to experience all of that in real time. I also thought, “What if, during this, we leave our main character? We hit our lead character with a car and leave him unmoving on the street for, like, two or three minutes?” The shock of that is hopefully like, “Whoa, how can they do that to him?” Part of the big difference from other oners was trying to tell the perspective from three points of view, while not cutting the camera. During production we heard Sam Mendes was doing an entire movie [1917] like this and were like, “SON OF A...!”, but then once you see it the feeling is very different.
2 SAJU’S DOUBLE CROSS
Ben Travis: If it’s inevitable that Tyler Rake’s rescue job will go wrong, there’s an interesting wrinkle in how it goes wrong — with Randeep Hooda’s Saju double-crossing Mr Rake due to having insufficient funds to pay for the full job. For a largely straightforward actioner, Saju’s dilemma adds welcome complexity — the fate of his own family hanging in the balance, he has no choice but to complete the job himself, even if it means turning on our hero. It twists nicely again when, realising their objectives are aligned, Rake and Saju team up for the final reel.
3 TYLER TAKES DOWN KIDS
John Nugent: After that 12-minute one-take extravaganza, the action takes on a different quality when Tyler must fend off a group of Amir’s (Priyanshu Painyuli) pint-sized, gun-toting henchmen. There’s something darkly comic about the mismatched dynamics of the fight, not to mention Hemsworth’s incredulous delivery of the line, “... the fuck?” (a rare chance for him to flex his seasoned comic muscles). As well as superior firepower and experience, Rake is at least twice as tall and wide as these kids, and it’s fun to watch how effortlessly he dispatches them. But while he leaves some damage — they’re going to need more than a dose of Calpol — Rake stops short of killing them: an important character beat, even if it earns bloody payback later. Hargrave has talked of how murdering the little tykes would be a line even Rake wouldn’t cross — but he goes right up the edge.
4 RAKE WITH A RAKE
In a perfect slice of nominative John Nugent: determinism, the gloriously named Tyler Rake at one point actually employs the services of a rake during one of his numerous killing sprees. Don’t let him near a B&Q— there would be no survivors.
5 TYLER TAKES ON GASPAR
Ben Travis: After three seasons of his cuddly father figure in Stranger Things, it feels surprising to see David Harbour turn antagonistic in Extraction. Initially Tyler and Ovi’s saviour, Harbour’s Gaspar is really mere drinks away from proposing childmurder for financial gain — even arguing that killing Ovi would be the humane thing to do. Cue a brutal scrap between him and Tyler, until Ovi shoots Gaspar, who dies slumping into an armchair.
Sam Hargrave: David just brings a very unique and visceral energy to the character, and it was really crazy to work with him just because every take was different. He’s the only guy in the movie who takes Hemsworth down. But we also wanted his death scene to be somewhat awkward, kind of pitifully awkward in a way, because he’s someone who made this decision to betray his best friend for what? Just for some more money.
6 THE BRIDGE
John Nugent: It’s on the bridge out of Dhaka where, in a manner of speaking, all hell breaks loose. This climactic sequence, teased in the cold open, looms over the whole film; it’s clear from the start our hero has been dragged over the coals and is unlikely to come out of it alive. The bridge becomes a deadly battleground between gangsters, corrupt cops and hired mercenaries, with Shataf Figar as a sniper colonel ruthlessly picking off targets, and Rake’s partner Khan (Golshifteh Farahani) finally seeing some combat. But it’s Hemsworth who steals the show here, a man battered and exhausted by his mission and by his past, and fighting as if he has nothing to lose; a Rake’s progress, if you will, seemingly meeting its end.
7 THE LAST SHOT
Ben Travis: Look — if you cast Chris Hemsworth in a pulsepounding action hit and give him a name as brilliantly ridiculous as Tyler Rake, it would be foolish to immediately kill him off. And while the drama dictates that he make the ultimate sacrifice to save Ovi, the clear franchise potential means that Tyler surely hasn’t swung his last rake.
Is that him by the pool at the end? Expect to find out in the officially greenlit Extraction 2.
Sam Hargrave: One of the changes that I made in the early drafts was that I felt like Tyler Rake’s story was completed with his sacrifice for the character of Ovi, so we went in with the intention of Tyler not making it out alive. So when we got to the ending, we shot a version of it. But even while we were shooting it there was a lot of discussion about other Tyler Rake stories. So when we went back for other additional photography to flesh things out, we shot a number of different versions of the ending. What you see in the end is an ambiguity.