Sometimes a smallest details can trip up your experience of a movie. About 40 minutes into Extraction, Tyler and Ovi are dodging gunmen in a Dhaka building. There they break into a apartment, and the famous intro to Didi tera dewar deewana plays. They alight a floor, ten seconds pass. After that, from an another apartment we hear the sound of Mehendi laga k rakhna. What are the chances of two instantly recognisable songs from bollywood are playing at the same time in present day in Dhaka? If this was a set from USA, an equivalent scene would be Tyler rushing from one apartment to another with some action music behind.
Sam Hargrave’s flim starts in earnest in Mumbai, with the kidnapping of a teenager Ovi, whose father is the India’s biggest drug dealer. The abductor is Bangladesh’s biggest drug dealer. Tyler an ex aussie military, now a mercenar- and his team are called in to do an extraction that is find the boy, get him out, get paid. Also in Dhaka is Saju, send down by Ovi’s father to oversee the rescue, but with the plan of his own how to achieve this.
Tyler gets Ovi out, but his escape ruined by Saju’s double cross and the local police closing all the exits by the instruction of Amir. Tyler’s bloody progress is impressively choreographed, becomes some how monotonus- he moves and executed his kills like a soldier.
Its action may not spark much joy but when extraction settles down for a quite moment, that is when you are in real trouble. Not content with giving Tyler a formulaic tough guy backstory- his life falls apart after his six years old died from cancer, the film also makes rich, unhappy Ovi, unloved by his own father, the perfect person for a father figure. " He thinks of me .more like a thing than a person, "he says, unburdening to a complete stranger who just killed several people and hit the one person he knows with a truck. After this Ovi told Tyler, " You drown not by falling into the river but by staying submerged in it."
The film does not have any interest in Dhaka- it could be any dirty city where Bangla is spoken. The one local character of note - Amir - is translated for Western audiences as the Pablo Escobar of his city. By no means Extraction is a realistic film, but it is set in the real world.
Overall this film is a good option for everyone to watch at least once.