Out of the Fire

After Triple Frontier, another likeably uncompromising and gritty action flick from Netflix. The choreography and direction are so predatory and imaginative that there are several scenes that I wanted to rewatch immediately after the credits rolled, and I did. The story is simple, but it also manages to surprise with one unusual, yet logical alliance in particular, and the quiet ending didn't bother me at all, quite the opposite – I felt like I needed a breather. I trusted Chris Hemsworth with everything. (25/04/2020)

Little buggers. Chris Hemsworth beats Indian kids! With top-notch action scenes driven by a straightforward plot from an unknown comic book, Extraction benefits mainly from the mad verve of director Sam Hargrave, who didn’t hesitate to tie himself to the top of a car with a camera to get the desired result. And really the one-shot car chase in the Benz through a hostile Dhaka makes the film worth watching again and again. Kids with Kalashnikovs on every street corner, dirt, blood and slit throats stay the course set by Wick. The future of action movies is not rosy, it’s blood red! (24/04/2020)

Who gives a crap about a more sophisticated script – that’s not my issue here – but this is merely two hours of systematically emptying bottomless clips without any display of emotion whatsoever. But what about the praises sung on this site about the 15-minute “continuous take”?  Well, when you make clever use of cuts (by zooming into macro details for an instant, right in the face) and unnoticeable dissolves, you can fill an entire feature-length film with such takes (just ask Sam Mendes), though it is of course all an illusion, even though it looks cool. To sum up, this is nothing new under the sun, just another yawn-inducing flick no one will remember three months from now. (29/04/2020)

Crazier version of Man on Fire, in other words another movie made by a “stuntman/director" where it is going without saying that shaky camera and frantic editing are a course of the action genre. From the same department as The Raid and Wick movies. Not in terms of the style of action, the type of movie or the uncompromising rawness, but because when watching action scenes you will inevitably delighted to say several time “I've never seen anything like this before, but I have always wanted to". You may not say it as often (basically twice; in a one-shot eleven-minute action hell while watching slums and rogues being beaten) as when watching the second Raid movie or John Wick sequel, but still more often than when watching most of the action movies from the last decades (exceptionalmovie ). On top of that, frequent action is so diverse that you won’t become bored of it. Straightforwardness does justice to this movie, the characters are sketched but functional, emotions work well, it simply does the job. The outcome is a genre move that knows what it wants to be and to who is the viewer. The only minor imperfection is a little bit too much sad, gloomy self-questioning, a too yellow toning and a rather open ending. (24/04/2020)

Thanks to being set in a convincingly dirty environment, Liam Hemsworth's muscle mass, and the fantastic pace where one attraction is swapped out for another, the adventures of the hero with the super tough name Tyler Rake landed in terms of mood one or two classes more higher than the much praised and often compared John Wick. The combination of mercenaries, the desperate fates of children of soldiers of fortune, and the action-packed aspects polished to the last cut compensate for the fact that this does not offer (nor does it seek to offer) anything new to the classical screenplay. (21/05/2020)