Some time ago I watched a random action movie on Netflix. It was one of those "pump out a new one every month" shots they take, where they use a relatively unknown set of actors, throw in one recognizable Movie Star to try to drag in audiences, and just hope for the best. There are many of them on Netflix. Most are not good. The one that day, though, was actually pretty good! It was called Extraction, and I left it thinking "yeah, that wasn't too bad, a pretty passable Everyone Gets Shot In The Face movie." And apparently everyone else agreed.
So, you know what that means! It means it's a Franchise now! We need Sequels! Give us the money! It's an inevitable and disappointing that this is the way movies are made now, but I watched this anyway, for Science, and as a show of respect to the original's well-choreographed action and lack of wasted time.
Sequels are almost always worse than the original movie but it's for a lot of different reasons in different cases. Sometimes, the original movie was an actually an idea for a movie someone wanted to make, and the next one is made out of fiscal obligation (which is what I think happened here). A very common problem, as I'm sure all movie watchers are aware.
Other times, they fall prey to the "wow, we need to do MORE" problem, where they don't realize that actually less is often more; explaining more lore removes mystery, adding "bigger" action suspends belief or undermines the movie's tone or pacing or style, etc. I think John Wick (a movie I reference a lot, I know) is a good example here, where it really makes it worse the more they try to explain the world rather than leaving one to wonder.
Still other times, they simply got the wrong impression about what was cool in the first one and expand on the wrong elements (since I just watched Mission Impossible, of course I am thinking of it, a stealthy/misdirection/spy movie with a little action, that has instead become an action movie franchise with some light spying).
Another Sequel Problem (since that's apparently the theme of this review) that this particular movie has is that they expect me to care about characters who I barely remember (if at all) from the first movie, without demonstrating to me WHY I should care about them except "they were in the last one." That isn't enough!
Extraction 2 still has some cool stuff in it, at least if you have a fetish for cutting and stabbing (I have never seen so many wrists slashed in a film). I am absolutely a sucker for long single action cuts and this movie has a really long one, so that's nice. It's just a little too Shaky Cam and "clearly, these actors aren't all trained for this" to be particularly good at it. Ultimately, the movie is just pretty boring and I never felt any investment in caring. I never found any compelling reason why this movie should have been made.
Score: 4/10
IMDb: Extraction 2
PS: Another Weird Sequel Thing is when a good first movie bequeaths its review scores to later movies in the series. Very often the first movie in a series has a lower score than its sequels, despite being obviously better, because critics do not realize yet that they are Supposed To Like This. But they do for the later movies, so they get higher scores. It is actually quite sad! Happens with games, too; speaking on broad aggregates, people really do rate things higher if they think they are popular.
PPS: Are we still not past the point in Action Movie History where the Eastern Europeans are the Bad Guys? OK, technically this wasn't Russians this time... but despite that, I do appreciate that movies like this are an opportunity for many actors in regions outside the US and England to get in bigger budget films. It's nice that they used actual Georgians for the Georgians!
