Extraction  ★★★

CHRIS Hemsworth has dipped his toes in the pure action genre but avoided taking the plunge…until now.

Extraction is his attempt to create a new franchise in a crowded market filled with the likes of John Wick, The Equalizer, Liam Neeson and Jack Ryan.

Tyler Rake is only slightly different to a lot of other action anti-heroes. He’s a former commando, turned occasional mercenary for hire.

But when we meet him Tyler is having some R&R with mates in outback Australia and isn’t too keen on a new assignment.

I can’t exactly remember why, but the shadowy figures who organise these missions convince him to lead the rescue of an imprisoned crime lord’s kidnapped son.

The mission appears to be going relatively as planned but, because most of the film is a flashback, we know from the opening minute that at some stage we will wind up at Tyler wounded and fighting for his life on a bridge.

Another stuntman, Sam Hargrave, makes his directorial debut and of course the focus is on the action set-pieces, many of which are terrifically executed and exciting to watch.

Hargrave has watched the best of Asian action films and strikes a good balance for Western audiences in terms of how far from the fighters his camera can be positioned.

Too close and it just becomes a mess of faces, hands and feet; too far and the intensity is lost. Hargrave’s camera moves like it is part of the action, observing from close quarters.

In terms of weapons combat, it’s all very efficiently done, even though we have seen the same stuff many times before.

The film was written by the Marvel Universe directing team of brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, based on a graphic novel, and the best thing they do is set the action across Bangladesh, India and Thailand, locations that we don’t often see in films for mainstream Western audiences

While I would have though it’s difficult to measure a film success during this COVID-19 response period, it must have done enough business on streaming services for the backers because Extraction 2 has been announced.