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| Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani) and Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) have a moment. |
The new movie picks up where the main action of the previous story left off: Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) has fallen off a bridge in Bangladesh and washed ashore downriver; he's picked up by an EMS crew, stabilized, and airlifted to Dubai (quite a long distance), where he receives top-flight treatment while his handler and co-mercenary Nik Khan (Farahani) tut-tuts over his health. Once he's recovered enough, Rake is shipped off to a seeming retirement at a mountain cabin in Austria, where he continues his convalescence and wonders what life has in store for him next. The answer comes in the form of a mysterious British contact (Elba), who tells Rake that Rake's sister-in-law, a Georgian named Ketevan (Dalakishvili) is being held in prison with her daughter Nina (played by twins Miriam and Marta Kovziashvili*) and son Sandro (Japaridze). Rake was married to Ketevan's sister Mia (Kurylenko), and as we know from the previous film, the two had a son who died, causing the couple to separate. With this personal motivation to return to action, Rake prepares for his new mission, but Nik—who is usually Rake's handler—is incensed at being kept out of the loop. She convinces Rake to let her and her brother Yaz (Bessa) in on the operation. The extraction doesn't go as planned: Ketevan's husband Davit (Bziava) has been keeping his wife and kids in prison with him as a way to control their movements, so, when Rake and two other fire teams break into Tkatchiri Prison to bust the wife and children out, a furious Davit instigates a riot, causing everything to go to hell. Rake eventually manages to get Ketevan out with her kids, killing an enraged Davit in the process, but news of Davit's death reaches his brother Zurab, a mobster whose organization essentially controls all of Georgia. So Rake now has to deal with the fury of the Georgian underworld as well as with the fact that Ketevan's teenaged son Sandro idolized his father and hates Rake for having killed him. Sandro still retains some loyalty to his uncle Zurab, and this becomes a huge issue as Ketevan tries to find a place to hide.
The movie features the same delirious blend of stunt work, awesome sets, and swooping camera techniques that made the first "Extraction" so watchable. The story is, once again, very simple and straightforward, but director Hargrave is perceptive enough to leave room for characterization: Andro Japaridze as the sullen teenager Sandro is convincingly annoying and sympathetic as a kid with divided loyalties. You see how he wants to betray Rake's ops team in the name of his mobster father and uncle, but at the same time, he loves his mother and doesn't want to see her hurt. The twins Miriam and Marta Kovziashvili play the role of six-year-old Nina with a great deal of quiet charm; there's even a cute little moment when Rake winks at Nina, and Nina winks back—a scene that made me think of Carrie Henn as Newt in "Aliens" offering a pert little salute and a thumbs-up. Golshifteh Farahani, gorgeous as always, is given a lot more to do in this film—almost too much because it was hard to figure out what exactly her relationship with Rake was: was Nik merely Rake's handler and backup, or was she a sister-in-arms fighting alongside him as part of a small fire team? You can sense that there's some romantic potential between Nik and Rake; I know I'd be head over heels for her if I had to work that closely with her all the time. Farahani also gets to show off her gift for languages: she's an Iranian-French actress, and we hear her speaking, at different moments, English, French, and Arabic (but not Georgian: she expresses surprise when she learns that Rake speaks Georgian thanks to having been married to Mia).
Some of the action scenes are absolutely gorgeous. There's one scene in which Rake, atop a train, takes down an attack helicopter with a heavy gun. The copter crashes and explodes in front of the careening train, and we're taken right through the explosion with no cuts. Another suspenseful and vertiginous fight scene takes place on a hotel's glass awning, high above Vienna. A fight on the aforementioned train offers a chance for some dizzying camera work as combatants try not to get crushed by tunnel walls whooshing past them. Far from her sniper role in the first film, Nik Khan gets up close and personal with plenty of John Wick-style hand-to-hand combat in this story; actress Farahani acquits herself well, feeling almost like a parallel to Halle Berry's character in "John Wick: Chapter 3."
One problem for the movie, though, is that we live in the era of the John Wick films, and comparisons to Wick will be inevitable. What's worse is that "Extraction 2" features the same problem for the hero that we saw in the third and fourth Wick films: the enemy is always wearing enhanced body armor, so taking each bad guy down means shooting and stabbing him multiple times. While it might be realistic to think that someone pumped up on adrenaline won't necessarily go down after a single bullet, I do find myself pining for the days when enemies were brought down a little more easily. The Extraction films and the Wick films share plenty of DNA: many of the same stunt people work on both films, and stuntman-martial artist Daniel Bernhardt, who has appeared in almost every Keanu production since the Matrix films (as well as in "Nobody"), is in "Extraction 2" as one of the tougher henchmen. As problems go, though, this is only a minor one.
"Extraction 2" is basically big, dumb summer fun. It follows a very similar template to the first film and leaves us wide open for a third film (where, hopefully, Rake and Nik will realize how much they already love each other). It's not a movie you want to think about too deeply, but it's very good at providing what it promises to provide: plenty of brutal, bloody action, women who are easy on the eyes, moms and kids being saved, and even a scene in which Chris Hemsworth's arm is on fire, and he uses his flaming arm to beat down a bunch of rioting prisoners. Who wouldn't want to watch that?
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*From what I understand, filmmakers are overjoyed when twins are available to play a single role for a child actor. This allows the twins to take turns in the role, avoiding burnout from the shooting schedule and keeping everyone happy instead of cranky.
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