A CIA killer (Ryan Gosling, whose popularity I’ll never get, because he doesn’t act in any sense of the word beyond acting as some sort of hole in a movie for a viewer to project whatever into and has little charisma I’d see) finds himself first on the run from his own people, and then looking to free the kidnapped sick child of his mentor (Billy Bob Thornton) while fighting off the the private sector incompetents of bad guy Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans, clearly having a blast with the villain role; also at least some recognizable character traits). A pacemaker with GPS is involved, so you can imagine how the rest of the script is.
On the corporate franchise side of movie making, brother duo Anthony and Joe Russo are responsible for some of my favourite Marvel movies – I’d even go so far as to call Captain America: The Winter Soldier one of the best action movies ever made in Hollywood – but their non-superhero action thrillers for Netflix suggest that Marvel’s presumably heavier hand is exactly what they need. Without that sort of guidance, we get movies as bad as Extraction, or as aggressively tedious as this one, a movie that somehow manages to make two hours of action sequences seem long and pretty boring. At least the incessant noise keeps one awake.
It doesn’t help here that none of the action sequences are anything more than big budget competent, lacking in inventiveness, interesting staging and the spark that makes a movie explosion fun, nor that the not-Bourne super spy script all of the action is based on is mostly pretty damn terrible. At least, it has more holes than most victims of Hansen’s or Six’s shoot-outs, does character motivation so badly, it would have been better not to even bother, and wastes a mostly great cast on nothing whatsoever. Because that’s not enough, the movie is also excruciatingly long-winded, and jumps from country to country without ever making any use of the different locations. This could all have happened in a warehouse and not looked or felt any less interesting.
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