K-SCORE: 7
Director: Steven C. Miller
Writer: Max Adams, Umair Aleem
“the car chase is weird because the sober character insisted on giving directions from the passenger seat to the drunk character”
Starring: Bruce Willis, Kellan Lutz, Gina Carano
Spoiler Level: Major
In order for Extraction to make its way through the tubes to my screen, it had to beat out other non-series Netflix instant watch options. After thirty minutes of searching, it was between this and London Has Fallen, and I thought, Bruce Willis, CIA plot - got to be better than London Has Fallen, right? <sigh> Now I have to fucking watch fucking London Has Fallen because I really hope what happened was that I chose poorly.
Extraction is incompetently written, acted, and directed, failing to tell an uninteresting, cliche-ridden story, simultaneously simplistic and getting lost in its own ideas. Imagine an amateur artist goes to an art exhibition featuring twenty other amateur artists, and instead of bringing his own work he brings a pair of scissors and cuts various sections out of the frames of other people’s crap art. Then he uses a glue stick to splice together a collage of sorts and hangs it up. You don’t buy that piece - you charge him for vandalism. The two lead actors read their dialogue without any consideration to the emotional context of any scene, making me wonder both what order it was shot in and what the message of any particular section was supposed to deliver. The plot revolves around a metal briefcase that can control “all the world’s telecommunications” and thereby empower villains to launch nuclear missiles. Yet the actual scenes are a training montage at the beginning, bickering over a failed field-agent application, our hero escaping from the back of a CIA SUV with the power of elbowing and driver incompetence, a bar fight with biker gangbangers, dress-up with a slut (who, before you accuse me of slut-shaming, was by far my favorite character), getting drunk and dancing with a low-level villain at a night club, drunk driving with aforementioned slut, and a confused brawl in a warehouse. There is no exchange of money; there are no computer technicians skilled in utilizing “The Condor”; there are no attempts made to track down any terrorists or captured good-guys; there are no villain demonstrations of power; there isn’t even the essential scene where the shunned wannabe CIA agent son of Bruce Willis proves his essential nature - he could have been killed at any point and the nuclear threat would have been extinguished just the same. There is no extraction in Extraction.
Worse than these plot problems is the fact that even the unoriginal scenes they did film are unentertaining, the worst versions of the type. The car chase is weird because the sober character insisted on giving directions from the passenger seat to the drunk character, but the cars never actually crash or have to navigate crowded streets or do anything abnormal on the road. The stripclub scene where the hot-female-agent character decides to seduce a scummy villain by getting up on the stripper pole is done PG-13 style and with a slow pace, and she’s not particularly attractive or seductive. The fights are short, difficult to follow on account of the pathetic editing, and not at all exciting. The twist is just that Bruce Willis set the whole thing up to lure an arms dealer who was responsible for the death of his wife into the path of his bullet, which means if The Condor really can launch nukes for whoever holds the briefcase, he’s tremendously irresponsible, putting avenging his dead wife ahead on his priority list of preventing nuclear holocaust. It is my belief that Bruce Willis chooses these roles based on the following criteria: first and foremost, the role can’t demand he craft any character that isn’t Bruce Willis’s default on-screen persona, and after that he’s just looking for the fewest lines of dialogue and least amount of screentime, so he has to be on set as little as possible before his payday. He’s in like nine minutes of the ninety.
There is one original moment in the film, which made me howl with laughter and almost made it worth my time. At the very end, the idiot CIA agent protagonist takes an assault rifle, throws the MacGuffin in the dirt in the middle of nowhere Newark, and opens fire like it’s a righteous execution. I’ve never seen that before. It’s a little like when Derek and Hansel pound on a monitor in Zoolander. “They’re in the computer!”