Extraction 2 Parent Guide

His little adventure in Bangladesh left international mercenary Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) near death. The only reason he’s still alive is that his handler, Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani) didn’t want to pull the plug on him – a decision which pays off when Tyler wakes up. His body isn’t the brutally effective killing machine it used to be, but after some whining and one training montage, Tyler Rake is back in business, with a job knocking on the door.

It turns out that Rake’s ex-wife’s (Olga Kurylenko) sister, Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili) married a singularly unpleasant Georgian criminal named Davit (Tornike Bziava). After the 2008 war with Russia, Davit and his brother Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani) made good money trafficking in arms, drugs, and people all over Eastern Europe – until Davit was jailed for throwing a nosy DEA agent off a roof. He’s been languishing in prison since, but his corrupt connections have enabled him to drag his wife and children inside to share his captivity. Tyler’s ex-wife wants her sister back, and Tyler seems to be the right man to break into a secured Georgian prison and pull a woman and two kids out from under the nose of one of the most dangerous men on the continent – and the noses of hundreds of his associates plus the prison guards. No big deal, right?

This is a rare case in which the sequel nobody asked for turned out to be better than the original. It’s not a high bar and the movie doesn’t clear it by much but, hey, progress is progress. The action scenes are still on the better side of average, with a couple of genuinely impressive single-take (or at least, invisibly cut) major fights, and the plot is still bland, generic, and relatively pointless. Our murderous gun-for-hire gets a little more backstory work, also blandly familiar, but again: progress. Maybe by the time Netflix makes the next sequel (and make no mistake, they will – apart from the sequel-baiting at the end of the film, the first movie set viewing records despite mediocre reviews), they’ll have some characters you might actually care about. Don’t get your hopes up, though.

Much like the original, this is a poor choice for kids. There’s a good deal of profanity, but the real issue is graphic violence. People are shot, stabbed, blown up, beaten with blunt objects, crushed with exercise equipment, heaved off of rooftops, and generally slaughtered with anything from a gun to a screwdriver. It’s gory and brutal, and that’s literally the point of the movie. There is, on the other hand, no sexual content to speak of and only brief social drinking in adult characters.

I think the film has such a comparatively low amount of profanity for the genre (see The Outpost for a truly staggering swear count) because there’s so little dialogue. There’s not much verbal connective tissue between the fight scenes, just barely enough to explain where we’re going to be slaughtering armed maniacs next and not an ounce more. The slim dialogue keeps the movie’s pacing up, which I appreciate, but it doesn’t do anything to make you care about what’s happening. Look at John Wick: You root for the protagonist first because he’s been hideously wronged and everyone loves some revenge – but Extraction 2 isn’t a revenge movie. Our hero is a hired killer with a messy personal life, no real redeeming qualities, and no prospect of any over the horizon. It’s just hard to make an audience care about a profiteering killer. Sure, the script plays him up as the tragic ex-military good guy in a tough job market, but I don’t think that angle jives with the facts. He’s not exactly the A-Team here.

So if mindless violence is what you want and sex and drugs are all that you were worried about, then go forth and enjoy watching some guy take a grenade to the head. If, on the other hand, you’d like a coherent thought to pass through your mind sometime in the next two hours, I’d recommend watching something else.