BEFORE: Just two action films stand between me and starting this Movie Year's romance chain, it's all set, it all came together just exactly almost as I hoped it would, and so I just need to get the adrenalin pumping a couple more times before we slow things down and take them nice and easy, celebrating love in all its crazy mixed-up beautiful and awkward forms. But let's blow a few more things up first, OK?
Dato Bakhtadze carries over from "The Darkest Hour".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Extraction" (Movie #3,664)
THE PLOT: After barely surviving his wounds from his mission in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Tyler Rake is back, and his team is ready to take on their next mission.
AFTER: SPOILER ALERT for "Extraction 2", also the end of "Extraction".
If you're playing along at home, tonight's mystery country that half of the cast comes from is Georgia. Not Russia, not the Soviet Union, I think there's a part at the end that was set in Austria, but half the cast here is Georgian, so there's zero overlap with the two movies this month that starred Russian actors. Of course not, because I love making things more difficult for myself. In addition, they also shot some scenes in Armenia and the Czech Republic, because why not?
The first "Extraction" film was set mostly in Bangladesh, and it sure looked like the main character was dead at the end, but then that film became a huge hit on Netflix, so it turns out he was only "mostly" dead, and the first half-hour of this sequel shows him being rescued and given medical attention, then there's a long sequence where he's in the hospital and doing physical rehab, cuz that's such a good use of screen time. Well, at least they were trying to be realistic, because getting shot in the neck and then falling off a bridge into a dirty river would probably require a lot of recovery time, and most movie franchises wouldn't take the time to show you that.
The plan is for Tyler Rake to go back to his cabin, watch TV with his dog and just try to be happy for the rest of his days, but come on, that's just not in the cards for him. Too bad, he deserves some down time after everything he's been through, but one day a mysterious stranger shows up at his cabin in the middle of nowhere and has a job for him. He's not inclined to take it, until he finds out that the job is to extract his ex-wife's sister, who's married to a very bad man in Georgia, who's somehow both very powerful AND also in prison and he's decided that the best way to keep his wife and children safe are to keep them in his prison cell, which makes absolutely no sense. I mean, if he's so important and powerful then why is he in prison, doesn't he have enough power and influence to keep himself out of there? And if there's another faction of criminals in the prison who are trying to kill him, then why bring his family there to keep them safe, instead of, say, sending them to another country for a while? It's just a dick move made by a control freak, I guess.
So the gangster's wife and kids need to be extracted, that's right up Tyer's alley - I'm reminded of the "Taken" franchise where Liam Neeson's character kept losing family members to criminals, first they took his daughter, then his wife and himself in the sequel, and then in "Taken 3" - well, nobody remembers, do they? I think I was the only person who watched that last one. But nobody told the gangster about the extraction, I guess, and he didn't really like what was happening when he realized his wife and kids were participating in a jailbreak, which fell right in the middle of a prison riot. Finally, the movie kicks into highest gear and stays in it for a very long time, as the prison riot leads into a van chase which leads into a train-based escape and an assault on that train from the villain's forces, now led by the villain's brother (Tyler's ex-sister-in-law's brother-in-law?).
It's meant to look like one continuous shot, through the prison break and the van chase, right up to the end of the train chase. Umm, I think? That would be impressive if they pulled it off, but then also maybe a little less so since "1917" tried to do this for the entire movie. I'm guessing that visual effects allowed for cheating in both cases, and if you look hard enough you can probably see where the seams are, where two shots were stitched together or there was a break originally but movie magic allowed the action to continue, sort of interrupted. (It's 21 minutes long, but took 29 days to shoot...) Damn, but it was still probably a lot of work, I wish this were the kind of thing that the Visual Effects Guilds would learn to appreciate, however it all falls under editing, which at its best is something of an invisible art form.
Everyone seems to be in the clear when they leave Georgia and make it to Austria, where they can all relax for a while in a beautiful skyscraper that turns out to be a terrible place to hide because there are floor-to-ceiling windows made of very breakable glass and also the top floor is very high and you'd hate to see a battle take place there because it would really suck to fall from there or be thrown off from there. So guess what... It turns out that these Georgian gangsters can also travel to Austria and track our heroes down, and then when it's all over, Tyler and his team are on the hook for operating shadow ops in a very beautiful peaceful country, because apparently they didn't ask permission to hide some extracted Georgians in Vienna, and then all this had to happen, plus a beautiful new skyscraper got absolutely ruined. Not to mention that church, which admittedly was undergoing repairs, but still - a church!
So Tyler and his mercenary handler end up in jail, but not to worry, the mysterious stranger who hired them in the first place, who works for an even more mysterious stranger is willing to arrange their release, provided they agree to make "Extraction III". Oh, yeah, it's gonna happen. What country's buildings will they destroy next time?
Also starring Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Golshifteh Farahani (last seen in "Rosewater"), Adam Bessa (last seen in "Extraction"), Tornike Gogrichiani, Tornike Bziava, Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "The November Man"), Idris Elba (last seen in "The Gunman"), Tinatin Dalakishvili, Andro Japaridze, Mariami Kovziashvili, Marta Kovziashvili, Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Irakli Kvirikadze, Levan Saginashvili, Megan Anderson, George Lasha (last seen in "Spectre"), Patrick Newall (last seen in "Kate"), Hector Andreu, Craig "Chili" Palmer, Ahmad Alhadi, Jenn Kirk, Tako Tabatadze, Vano Dugladze, Travis Gomez, Matt LaBorde, Dustin Stern-Garcia (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Shahaub Roudbari (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Justin Howell (last seen in "The Man from Toronto"), Rayna Campbell, Hristo Dimitrov, Jordan Le Goueff, Sam Hargrave (also last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Demetre Kavelashvili, Giga Shavadze, David Chogovadze.
RATING: 6 out of 10 fake passports
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