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Extraction
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Lions Gate Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (6th March 2016). |
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The Film
 CIA agent Leonard Turner (Die Hard's Bruce Willis) has not been the same since his wife was murdered by members of Dmitri Kovrov's (John Wick's Roman Mitichyan) gang. For ten years, his son Harry (The Legend of Hercules's Kellan Lutz) has channeled his feelings of guilt and failure at being unable to fight back and having to be rescued by his father's colleague Ken Robertson (Taken 2's D.B. Sweeney). In the ensuing decade, Robertson has kept Turner peripherally employed while the agency has tried to railroad him for his "field antics" and expertly trained Harry for the field. In spite of his training, Harry has been working as an analyst in the Prague office after having his request for field duty rejected four times in two years. With Robertson arranging for the handoff of the advanced communications hacking unit CONDOR off to the Americans, Harry has been trying to find concrete proof that the Romanians are making a concerted effort to steal the device. What Harry, CIA director Sitterson (The Conjuring's Steve Coulter), and the rest of the department do not know is that Robertson has arranged for Turner to handle the drop-off until he and the device disappear. Robertson reveals that the device will take twenty-four hours to go online and that it can only be stopped by a decompiling program called the Patriarch Key which must be physically uploaded to CONDOR via a flash drive; at which point Sitterson directs him to get the Patriarch Key into the hands of agent Victoria Phair (Haywire's Gina Carano) who must operate discreetly while violating FBI jurisdiction. Harry hands over all of his intelligence pointing to the Romanians but he is shut out of the operation because he is too emotionally involved and more concerned with getting his father back than making sure CONDOR is not used against America. Sitterson directs agent Higgins (Lone Survivor's Dan Bilzerian) to escort Harry home and make sure he does not interfere, but Harry manages to escape; whereupon Sitterson and the audience learn that the only reason Harry has been refused field duty is because his father has been calling in favors to protect his son. Harry manages to get past the border patrol and onto a plane to Newark, having traced the source of the intelligence with the help of office mate Darryl (Jarhead's Tyler Jon Olson) to Romanian drug dealer Drake (Terminator Genisys's Joshua Mikel). Although Robertson relays intelligence to Harry from a subsequent ransom video that the terrorist group Al-dawla Sayyaf is behind the abduction and theft – with a threat to set the coordinates of all missile silos at the continental United States – and ex-lover Victoria ordered to return him to Prague immediately, simulation-trained Harry persists in his investigation of the Romanians and mounts an unsanctioned rescue operation against gangsters, bikers, and an assassin sent after him by his own government. Despite what is probably a single day's work from Willis and the athletic if stiff presence of box office hopeful Lutz, a film that considers the presences of "Instagram Playboy" Bilzerian and would-be Mr. Sofía Vergara Nick Loeb as stunt casting does not aim high. Extraction is budget-conscious but still a little shabby, but it does manages to build some excitement once it gets past the laborious setup (during which one cannot help but harshly scrutinize everything about its construction) with Lutz and Carano (more personable in Heist which was content to merely aspire to "popcorn movie" status) kicking plenty of ass in between the hunt for a MacGuffin. While it is not quite so hard to believe a rigorously-trained but operative however inexperienced in the field might do well when it came to the physical rigors, it does stretch credibility a little when he stabs a suspect in the hand with a screwdriver and interrogates him with a variation on Russian Roulette and goes from his training in shooting and boxing to using every blunt instrument as a makeshift weapon in the smoky warehouse finale. The usual string of twists goes from fairly diverting to typically ludicrous, with one character turning on another at the last minute causing the latter to spill out a whole host of illegal doings to establish himself as a supervillain deserving of a climactic send-off (with the other heavy's death a pre-end credits punchline). Although the direction of Steven C. Miller is technically adept, the film does not thrill on the visceral level of The Aggression Scale or even elicit the cringes of the vicious Silent Night (both a huge step up from his earlier genre efforts Automaton Transfusion and Scream of the Banshee).
Video
Although lensed in Hawk Scope (a set of lenses that allow for an anamorphic scope format for HD cameras with 16:9-shaped sensors), LionsGate's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC widescreen transfer is cropped to 1.78:1, cutting off image on the sides compared to the 2.40:1 matted clips in the disc's include making-of featurette. Although it does not look severely cropped in terms of composition, the 1.78:1 framing does add to the feeling of overall cheapness (well, low budget-ness) along with the pushed colors and digitally-simulated "bleach bypass" effect of the green-tinged Newark exteriors (compared to the Prague scenes which sport oversaturated but more realistic color).
Audio
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is appropriately forceful when it comes to the score and directional effects (source music during the nightclub scenes sound rather muffled even when the characters are not speaking). Optional subtitles are included in English, English SDH, and Spanish.
Extras
The audio commentary by director Steven C. Miller and actor Kellan Lutz is actually an entertaining listen as they discuss the travails of shooting an action film in seventeen days (the entire film was shot in Mobile, Alabama with the Prague exteriors consisting of stock footage). The director reveals that he had actually been in talks with Lutz to do another movie when he was offered Extraction and thought him ideal for the lead, as well as working with Willis for a day's shooting and the actor's willingness to experiment even on a limited schedule. Lutz recalls that they originally scheduled two days to film the fight scenes but ended up allotting roughly three to four hours to each one, and how stunt coordinators Simon Rhee (Best of the Best) adapted the fight scenes to his specialization. Miller also reveals that he cut back on the gunplay in favor of hand-to-hand combat and deliberately avoided using slow motion. "The Making of Extraction" (12:57) featurette is pretty disposable, focusing much more on the background and motivations of the cardboard characters than the film itself. The deleted/extended scenes (4:42) are similarly redundant, some stopping the action so that Harry can brood a little more on his tragic childhood. The extended interviews (29:10) with director Miller, actors Lutz, Carano, Sweeney, Bilerian, and Mikel, as well as director photography Brandon Cox (The Collector) are actually the leftovers from material excerpted for the making-of featurette. The film's theatrical trailer (2:06) and trailers for other LionsGate action titles round out the package.
Overall
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