Extraction 2 Goes Big, Netflix's Best English Language Action Film

Netflix has something going for them with the Extraction series. In the inventory of their biggest-buck action flicks,* the roughly $75 million Extraction 2 stands out amidst the likes of the $200 million Red Notice and the $150 million 6 Underground. A sequel to the 2020 Chris Hemsworth spy engine, Extraction 2 is the best English-language Netflix original action film I’ve seen. Internationally, as far as I can vouch (and I’ve yet to see the French Lost Bullet series), only the Vietnamese Furies (2022) and the Indonesian The Night Comes for Us (2018) are superior.

Television exempt, the original streaming service creates very few originals that actually control a sustained film discourse, good or bad. Extraction 2 feels like it could be one of Netflix’s very rare discourse drivers—and of the good variety.

Picking up immediately where the first film left off, the Aussie black ops operative Tyler Rake (Hemsworth, who notably kills someone with a rake in the first movie) just escapes death in Mumbai. Recovering in Austria until Idris Elba ruins his retirement to offer a mission extracting his ex-wife’s sister and her children from a Georgian prison where her abusive cultist-gangster husband has trapped them, Rake sees an opportunity to atone for his past familial sins.

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