Extraction

Sam Hargrave, stunt coordinator on Captain America: Civil War and two Avengers films, directed this 2020 thriller about a mercenary sent to pull a kidnapped boy out of Dhaka. The source is Ciudad, the graphic novel the Russo brothers wrote with Ande Parks. There the city is Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, the rescue is an eighteen year old woman who becomes Tyler Rake’s lover. The film moves it to Dhaka, makes the rescue a boy, and gives Rake a dead son to explain the attachment. None of it was shot in Bangladesh: Mumbai supplied Dharavi and Byculla, with more work in Ahmedabad and Ban Pong, Thailand. The spine is a roughly twelve minute stretch built to look unbroken. It took ten days, the joins sit in doorways, and the room beyond a door was often ten blocks away. Hargrave strapped himself to a car for the close work. Rake died in the script as written; the open ending came after test screenings. The politics behind the kidnapping barely open up, because the camera never stops. A good fit if you accept that the unbroken illusion is the whole promise and the film barely cares who Ovi’s father is. Not for anyone who needs Dhaka to register as a place rather than a surface to run across.