Extraction 2

Extraction 2 (2023) brings back the mercenary presumed dead at the end of the first film. Tyler Rake was recovered after falling from the bridge and spent months in treatment. He is living in a cabin in Austria. A woman arrives with a job: a family is being held in a prison in Georgia, a woman and her two children, kept there by her husband, who runs a criminal organisation. At the centre is a technical display. A prison riot, the yard, a vehicle convoy and a train sequence are edited as one shot; it runs about twenty one minutes with no visible cut. The camera comes out of a fight, gets into a car, passes through a window, moves to a helicopter and continues on top of a train. It is not actually one take; it is assembled from pieces with the joins hidden behind a movement or an object. Sam Hargrave directed; he started as a stunt coordinator and often carries the camera himself. In the action sequences the operator is running inside the fight. Chris Hemsworth stars and did most of the fighting himself; there is a scene in which he burns and it was shot with real flame. Joe Russo wrote it; the Russo brothers produced. It was made by Netflix and became one of the platform's most watched films. The story is thin and the characters shallow; the film does not pretend otherwise. It works without the first film. It runs 123 minutes. Good for: action, fight choreography, and technical showmanship. Less good for: the violence is heavy and the script is entirely a pretext.