Now for something more trivial

Let's do a quick review of the Netflix action movie Extraction:

As nearly everyone else has said - some very technically and thrillingly accomplished action (if rather bloody in a way I normally object to) in a merely serviceable story, but quite satisfying overall.   

Some different things about the film:

*  it was odd and a little amusing to hear Chris Hemsworth using full-on Aussie accent and vernacular, rather than the more mid-Pacific accent he usually uses in American movies;

* I can understand why Banglasdesh doesn't like the film - it makes Dhaka look like an absolute 3rd world, dangerous, corrupt, dump of a city, yet I think it was nearly all filmed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad.  (Knowing this may make viewers scratch that Indian city off any "places to visit" list too, since it looks so polluted and dirty.)  

* the camera work and action is just so impressive, though.  And not in an overly editted way which is my main complaint about modern action directors.   (It could hardly be accused of that when it has one widely praised no-cut car chase that goes on for about 11 minutes.  It is really terrific.)

One thing I can justify even though my son complained and complained about it:

*  why, he whined, will I watch this and say it's pretty thrilling, but refuse to watch John Wick movies?  Well, I have watched about 15 to 20 minutes of John Wick movies - the beginning of the first one, and some action sequence from (I think?)  the second one.   I abandoned the first movie because I was finding the dialogue and acting was terrible - I don't remember much about any action in that.    But the second time I was watching a fight in train, and it was all very stabby- stabby and arm breaky (perhaps close up pistol shot to the head as well?) from recollection.

Here's the thing - I found that the John Wick violence was deliberately more "up close and personal" and quasi-sadist in tone than that in Extraction.   Sure, both movies feature baddies getting what they deserve, and lots of blood;  but I thought Extraction did much faster cutaways from things like throat cuttings, stabbings and even gunshots to the head shots than Wick.  It also didn't much feature the sound of bones breaking (I bet that's in Wick) or close ups of stabbings.   And most of the death in Hemsworth's movie was gun fire, which usually (but not always) featured a spray of blood but not much else.

The fights are heavily choreographed in both, of course, and both feature the same methods of killing.    But my reaction to movie violence depends a lot on how much the movie emphasises its effects - hence I really get sick of the modern Netflix speciality of shots to the head and brains blown out the back as a routine thing.   I think Extraction did an acceptable level of moving on fast from the violent act, whereas Wick seemed to want to dwell on them.  I would have to watch all of a Wick film to confirm this, perhaps with a stopwatch in hand, but I reckon I can justify this scientifically.

Anyway, that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Update:  forgot to mention, I think the deliberate ambiguity of the ending is actually pretty clever.