Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is a black market mercenary. He, apparently, experienced some kind of terrible loss in his life, so he drinks a lot and at the same time takes on any, even the most hopeless cases.
And such a thing quickly turned up. The boy Ovi (Rudraksh Jaiswal), the son of a major Indian drug dealer Mahajan, who is currently in prison, was kidnapped by the people of the Bangladeshi drug dealer Amir Asif (Priyanshu Payyuli). A huge ransom is demanded for the boy, which Mahajan is unable to pay, as his accounts are blocked by the government.
Mahajan accuses his assistant Saju (Randeep Hood) of not keeping track of Ovi, although he was instructed to keep an eye on Mahajan’s son, so now Saju must return Ovi, otherwise Mahajan’s people will deal with both Saju and him family.
Saju doesn’t have enough money to hire a group of professional mercenaries. But he has a plan. He negotiates with the group Nik Khan (Golshifte Farahani), in the squad of which Tyler Rake works, and makes an advance payment.
Saju’s plan is this: after Tyler Rake steals the boy from Amir Asif’s bandits, Saju will intercept the boy and take him home. Then it will be possible for him not to send the second tranche to the Nik Khan group and he will justify himself before Mahajan.
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An action film commissioned by Netflix by Sam Hargrave, a stuntman and director of action scenes in many famous action films, in particular in the films Avengers: Endgame and Explosive Blonde, where, I note, the fights are just very, very impressive. As a stuntman, for example, he replaced Chris Evans in the dangerous scenes in the film “The First Avenger: The Winter Soldier”. For Sam Hargrave, this is, by the way, a directorial debut, before that he directed only a few short films.
The script was written by Joe Russo based on the comic book Cuidad, which was created by Joe himself and his brother Andy Russo, writer Ende Parks and artist Fernando Leon Gonzalez. By the way, Joe Russo is just an experienced director: together with his brother Andy, he staged Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. In fact, it was during the filming of the last Avengers movie that Joe told Sam Hargrave about the idea of producing such a movie.
The idea was liked by the management of the streaming service Netflix, which is now actively investing in the production of expensive full-length films, and the creators of these films, as a rule, are given complete creative freedom. According to the script, something in between The Raid and John Wick was supposed to turn out here, the main emphasis was on chases, shootouts and battles, so the candidacy of Hargrave, who knew how to put it all perfectly, Netflix was quite satisfied.
As it turned out later, Netflix did not fail. A solid budget of $ 65 million was allocated for the filming of the picture, the film after the release in the first four weeks showed as many as 90 million views, which was considered an excellent result in the studio, and they even started talking about a sequel, although it was not originally planned, and Hargrave spoke in an interview about that, they say, all these endless franchises hesitated, so they tried to make it a piece, one-time product.
By the way, in the original the film is called Extraction, which in this case is most accurately translated as “Evacuation”, but for some reason United Statesn distributors gave the film the cumbersome name “Tyler Rake: Rescue Operation”. Why did they do it? Did they really know that this would become a franchise after all, and set the stage for “Tyler Rake: Back to Hell”, “Tyler Rake: Not His War” and “Tyler Rake: Deuce Again”?
But back to the film. What did they get? On the one hand, this is a fairly typical action movie with a terribly primitive scenario: a kid was stolen, the task of returning him back is hopeless, but Tyler is not looking for easy ways, it would be more difficult for him – he got this job. Everything that is possible has gone wrong, now Tyler will have to somehow break through in an almost hopeless situation and save the boy. The little boy, of course, will turn out to be a very sweet and handsome boy, despite the daddy monster, Tyler, of course, has some old wounds associated with his child, so Tyler will brutally destroy over a hundred policemen and military men to save the boy, and also kill about a dozen more of the same boys who work for Amir Asif.
In the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, absolutely everyone is subordinate to the drug lord Amir Asif and works for him, including the top military leadership, and Amir himself pleases the eyes of the audience with a constant change of very beautiful and spectacular half-perdons in the spirit of “A Thousand and One Nights”.
However! The plot is a plot, but purely staged it is action, action, action and once again action, where, just while watching, you don’t think much about what is actually happening here. And these are not Marvel superheroes for you, where everything is drawn on a computer and looks, although spectacular, but still very cartoony. Here the emphasis is on realism – as in “The Raid” and in the fights in “Explosive Blonde”. The camera involved in the action, constantly monitoring Tyler’s movements through narrow corridors, apartments, stairs and rooftops, the frantic pace of gun-fight at close range, fighting with knives, fists and everything that comes to hand – it’s impressive.
In addition, there is an eleven-minute action scene shot in one shot, as if without cuts. Here is an interesting two-minute video that tells how this scene was filmed (English). Director Hargrave personally climbed with a camera on the hood of one of the cars involved in the chase to film it all.
However, I note that there are many other action scenes that look very realistic and filmed with the maximum effect of presence.
The style of the film is emphatically hard, brutal. No jokes for you, like in The Avengers. And Chris Hemsworth, who plays the title role, is also very serious, but he knows how to have fun in the film, especially when Taika Waititi is sitting in the director’s chair.
But here, his Tyler is a well-trained, very capable man who has survived a terrible tragedy that makes him indifferent to mortal danger: he is simply not afraid to die and, perhaps, even wants to.
Hemsworth is in excellent physical shape and in all these fight scenes, staged brightly and spectacularly, he looks great.
The boy Ovi was well played by Rudraksh Jaiswal: the boy turned out to be very touching, but not pathetic at all – he behaved with great dignity and really wanted to be saved.
Randeep Huda as Saju, who is practically the third most important character here, is also good. There are a lot of fight scenes with him, especially during the confrontation between Saju and Tyler, and he didn’t get lost there even at the level of Hemsworth.
Well, I really liked Golshifte Farahani, an Iranian by origin, who played the head of the mercenary detachment. An incredibly spectacular woman, she looked very dignified in the fight scenes (Tyler had to be rescued somehow). By the way, Golshifte could play Tamina in “Prince of Persia”: she was invited to London for screen tests, but before the flight, the Iranian authorities arrested the actress at the airport and forbade her to leave the country for six months – because of her filming in Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies”.
This picture of criticism is usually compared with “The Raid” and “John Wick”. In my opinion, this film is still closer to “The Raid” than to “John Wick”. In “The Raid,” for most of the film, a group of commandos stormed the house of a drug gang and, in doing so, passed through a specific hell. And in John Wick, a muddy United Statesn killer, nicknamed Baba Yaga, raked the lyuley from three suffocators, after which he put on a black suit and set off in an extremely improbable way to bring down the next half of the United Statesn mafia of New York from all trunks. Keanu Reeves, well aware that not a single bullet would take his character by definition, did not bother with any emotions, but simply walked back and forth, mowing people in batches. For John Wick, though, they came up with this chic, decadent Continental Hotel, which was really cool, but that’s about it.
Here, there are no decadent hotels at all, gunfights are noticeably more realistic, Taylor’s indestructibility is much lower, although its elements, of course, are present – not a single person is able to go through this – and it all looks, in my opinion, strong better than John Wick. Yes, the script is primitive, the main villain is caricatured, and the whole city is subordinate to him, but Hemsworth is much more charismatic than Keanu Reeves, so my sympathies are on the side of Tyler Rake.
You won’t lose anything if you don’t watch this film, but as an uncomplicated action movie, delivered with unconditional mastery in terms of action as such, this is quite a worthy representative of this genre. Bublik and I did not regret that we watched it, thus becoming 90,000,001 and 90,000,002 viewers of this picture on Netflix.
Tyler Reik: Operation Rescue / Extraction movie meaning
Director: Sam Hargrave Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Golshifte Farahani, David Harbour, Rudraksh Jaiswal, Shivam Vichare, Piyush Khati, Randeep Huda, Pankaj Tripathi, Chris Jai Alex, Adam Bessa, Wayne Blair
Budget: $65 million
Action, 116 min.