STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is a burnt out mercenary, who's assigned to rescue Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the intelligent son of a notorious gangster, who's currently holed up in jail. After successfully completing this mission, he finds the kidnappers aren't as willing to relinquish their hostage as he'd hoped, plunging him into a deadly battle through the streets of Dhaka, where everything is not as it seems, and he can trust no one.

As cinemas around the country (and the world, of course) are closed in the lockdown, streaming services like Netflix are going to be more popular than ever, as people, and certainly film lovers, will crave the sense of escapism that the filmic experience provides even more than they usually do. And, indeed, the main function of a film like Extraction will be to escape to another world, because there will never be any sense of realism in some action film where one man takes on a whole bunch of villains and defeats them without getting a scratch, the ones popularised so greatly throughout the 80s and 90s. Which the feature length directorial debut of Sam Hargrave ultimately emerges as one, big generic regurgitation of.

Hargrave saturates everything with the standard present day dark, moody style, with a gloomy, blurred shooting style, setting the overall tone for the film itself. If it hadn't been so heavy and humourless, and a little shorter and less self indulgent, it could have passed as a harmless, run of the mill actioner, something to nod off to late at night, but instead it's one big, overblown event that seems to be stabbing at something deeper. Hemsworth is effective and convincing as an action hero, there's a depressingly authentic recreation of the Indian slums and it livens up at the end, with some pretty decent action, but it all amounts to the same thing.

There's an Aladdin's cave of these type of movies in the back catalogue of films from the 80s and 90s, and there's plenty you can seek out, which will be over and done with much quicker and give you much the same experience. Usually starring Steven Seagal. **