What To Watch Next If You Love Extraction
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It's no surprise that director Sam Hargrave's Extraction, which tells the story of mercenary Tyler Rake's efforts to save a teenager named Ovi from Bangladeshi drug lords, has become such a big hit. It's got everything a big Hollywood blockbuster needs for success: a charismatic leading man, an interesting and woefully underrepresented location, a plot that tugs at the heartstrings without ever sacrificing action, and some of the best stunt work this side of John Wick. There's nothing else out there quite like it.
Well, okay, almost nothing. While Extraction absolutely stands alone, it is part of a long tradition of action films, and plenty of other movies cover some of the same ground. Action movies have been traveling to exotic locales for years. Lone wolf heroes who protect the weak and innocent are a staple of the genre. Many of the best thrillers force the protagonist to fight against seemingly impossible odds, and there's almost always a little blood.
Extraction stands up to repeat viewings, but it's going to be a while before the inevitable Extraction 2 hits. As such, you'll probably need something to fill that Tyler Rake-shaped void in your life. Well, look no further. These movies, which include big-budget slugfests, taut indie thrillers, and almost everything in between — should be more than enough to get the job done.
Kilo Two Bravo
Extraction mines a lot of excitement from action scenes that unfold in confined or limited spaces. The whole film is about Rake and Ovi trying to escape the city of Dhaka, which is surrounded by four rivers. Its climactic action scene takes place on a single bridge. The knife fight between Rake and Saju unfolds on a narrow city street. Even Extraction's most technically impressive sequence, the 12-minute chase scene, is shot mostly from the inside of Rake's car.
Kilo Two Bravo is the same, although with the tension ramped way, way up. In Kilo Two Bravo, a group of British soldiers end up stuck in a dried-up riverbed in Afghanistan loaded with old Russian mines, making every step a potentially deadly event. Because of the mines, helicopters can't land to rescue them. Equipment shortages and simple miscommunications delay potential rescues. Despite the wide-open desert locale, Kilo Two Bravo is remarkably claustrophobic. It doesn't shy away from violence, either. When watching Kilo Two Bravo, you'll feel the impact of every explosion and watch horrified as their bloody aftermath unfolds.
Oh, and just to make things even more excruciating, Kilo Two Bravo does an excellent job introducing you to its young subjects before dropping them into danger and it's based on a true story. Compared to Extraction, Kilo Two Bravo doesn't provide much escapism, but it's just as — if not even more — exciting. For director Paul Katis, it's one heck of a debut.
The Siege of Jadotville
Like Extraction, The Siege of Jadotville is all about spectacle. Oh, sure, the movie contains a subplot about the political malpractice that landed Irish commandant Pat Quinlan (played by 50 Shades of Grey leading man Jamie Dornan) and his brigade in trouble. It's based on a true story, too. In 1961, 157 Irish soldiers deployed to the Democratic Republic of Congo by the U.N. kept over 3,000 attackers at bay over the course of five days without losing a single man, only to have their heroic efforts swept under the rug by the Irish government after they were forced to surrender.
The meat of the film, however, isn't the backstory or the characters, despite solid performances from Dornan and Kingsman's Mark Strong. It's the titular siege. For close to an hour, The Siege of Jadotville drops you into the middle of a ferocious battle in which our heroes are outmanned, outgunned, and increasingly overwhelmed. It doesn't take long before supplies of bullets begin to fall dangerously low, before calls for help go unheeded, and before defeat seems all but inevitable.
The film's director, Richie Smyth, comes from a music video background — he's worked with U2 and Verve a number of times — and The Siege of Jadotville, which is his first feature film, is just as slick and stylish as you'd expect. If you watch a lot of war movies, you'll find a number of well-trod genre tropes in Jadotville. But when the bullets start flying, you'll be too enthralled to notice.
Bad Boys II
What's better than one charismatic action-star lead? Why, two of 'em, of course. Like its predecessor, Bad Boys II is full of stylish, over-the-top action, but its real draw is the relationship between Will Smith's Mike Lowrey and Martin Lawrence's Marcus Burnett, which will likely go down in history as one of the best buddy-cop duos of all time.
For Lowrey and Burnett's second big-screen adventure, the two Miami detectives bring down an international drug ring, fight the KKK, trade wisecracks, (accidentally) take ecstasy, and straight-up invade Cuba in their quest for justice. It's madness. However, the brotherly bond between Mike and Marcus, which is only tested when Marcus realizes that Mike is dating his sister, grounds the whole thing. Ultimately, Bad Boys II has the same appeal as a hang session with good friends, albeit one where explosions just happen to be involved.
Bad Boys II is a lot sillier than Extraction — for all of its charms, Tyler Rake's adventure isn't particularly funny — but in terms of scale, its madcap action scenes rival anything you saw in the Chris Hemsworth thriller. Look, this is a Michael Bay joint. You know what you're in for. Besides, it's hard not to watch Bad Boys II and wonder if Rake should get a partner in Extraction's inevitable sequel. We know Hemsworth has comedy chops. Give him a partner with whom he shares some chemistry — hey there, Tessa Thompson — and you're more or less golden.
Olympus Has Fallen
Director Antoine Fuqua's record is full of hits. He directed Training Day, which won Denzel Washington an Academy Award, and turned The Equalizer into a household name. While not every film he directs is a guaranteed smash, the guy seriously knows his way around an action movie.
That's definitely evident in Olympus Has Fallen. In this Gerard Butler vehicle, North Korean terrorists attack the White House, murder both the American vice president and the president of South Korea, and take the US president (The Dark Knight's Aaron Eckhart) hostage. It's up to a disgraced Secret Service agent played by Butler to break into the White House, rescue the president and his son, and get everyone to safety. That's easier said than done, of course, given that the terrorists have a man on the inside and that the White House is one of the most secure buildings on the planet.
Olympus Has Fallen is basically Die Hard with Nakatomi Plaza swapped out for the People's House — or, to look at it another way, Extraction if Ovi were the leader of the free world instead of a teenage boy. It's a loud film without a shred of subtlety. In one scene, the American flag is ripped to shreds by bullets, while Butler bashes a bad guy's head in using a bust of Abraham Lincoln in another. It's also spectacularly, unrepentantly violent in the best possible way. In other words? It's an action junkie's dream come true.
Black Sea
Look, if you think trying to smuggle a child out of a foreign city swarming with enemies is tough, try fighting for your life in a submarine more than a mile under water. That's what Jude Law's Captain Robinson, an underwater salvage expert, has to do in Black Sea. After getting laid off from his long-time job, Robinson hires a crew and rents an old sub in hopes of retrieving a multi-million dollar supply of gold from a Russian submarine off the coast of Georgia.
The problem? Half the crew is Russian and half is American, and neither side can really communicate with the other — and to say they've got trust issues would be an understatement. With such a large amount of money at stake, it's only a matter of time before everything goes to hell. Thankfully, Black Sea doesn't rush getting there. Black Sea is the rare action film that really makes you care about its characters before putting them into danger. And this Jude Law guy is a pretty great actor, too, which certainly doesn't hurt.
Besides all that, submarines really are the perfect vehicle for an action film. The tight quarters and fragile environments mean there's no room for error, and it's hard to imagine a more dangerous situation than fighting in a glorified tin can with the entire weight of the ocean pressing down on you. Black Sea plays with sub movie conventions even while nodding towards the movies that inspired it; in addition to Das Boot, there's quite a bit of The Treasure of Sierra Madre in Black Sea's make-up. That all makes this a very, very film-nerd-friendly experience. Watch Black Sea, and you'll see what we mean.
The Foreigner
So, maybe you think The Foreigner is going to resemble a James Bond movie. After all, it was directed by Martin Campbell, who helmed both GoldenEye and Casino Royale, and it co-stars Pierce Brosnan, the fifth big-screen 007. Or, maybe you think it's going to be a comedic stunt-fest since the movie stars Jackie Chan. As you may know, Jackie Chan is certainly known for the whole stunt-fest thing.
You would be very, very wrong on both counts. There's no doubt about it, The Foreigner is an action movie through and through, but you've never seen either Chan or Brosnan quite like this before. No quips. No slapstick. Just pure, unadulterated action. As Ngoc Minh Quan, a Vietnam vet who's out to bring down the IRA splinter group that killed his daughter, Chan brings an intensity to The Foreigner that we've never seen from him before. Brosnan's character, an Irish politician and former IRA member who reluctantly helps Quan hunt the bombers, is even more complicated, letting Brosnan show off a range that his super-spy days only hinted at.
It's Chan's half of the story that'll remind viewers most of Extraction. Like Tyler Rake, Quan is a man on a mission in a foreign locale. And also like Tyler Rake, he kicks an unholy amount butt. Still, it's just as fun watching Brosnan unravel the conspiracy around him as it is to see Quan take the fight to terrorists. While The Foreigner himself may get top billing, this is definitely a two-man show. It's all the better for it.
End of Watch
Before directing high-budget blockbusters like Suicide Squad and Bright, director David Ayer — who also wrote Training Day and shares a co-writing credit for the very first Fast and Furious movie — cut his teeth on low-budget crime movies. Of those, End of Watch is by far Ayer's best. Not that Ayer is repeating himself with End of Watch, of course. While Ayer's early movies are full of corrupt cops, End of Watch's two heroes, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, are as straight as they come.
It's a refreshing subversion for a genre that's overflowing with antiheroes, law-flouting vigilantes, and criminal scum — even Tyler Rake, as likable as he is, is a guy with a pretty shady past. End of Watch is really carried by the relationship between the two honorable police officers. Not that there aren't bad guys, of course. Over the course of the movie, Gyllenhall and Peña's LAPD officers run afoul of the real-life Sinaloa Cartel, leading to bouts of explosive violence that are just as thrilling as they are horrific.
End of Watch is a gritty and grounded depiction of the urban police experience, thanks to its focus on everyday police life and its innovative camera work — many shots were captured using body and dashboard cams, and Gyllenhaal actually filmed some of the footage himself while acting. Plot-wise, End of Watch shares DNA with what you'd expect to find in a lot of cop movies. But if you've been watching a lot of big-budget action movie spectaculars, End of Watch is a really nice change of pace.
Blood Father
Given the controversies that have followed Mel Gibson when the cameras are off, the troubled star can be a tough sell as a movie's lead these days. But there's no denying that the Aussie is action movie royalty. Blood Father proves why. Protagonist John Link has seen better days. He's an ex-con and a recovering alcoholic who runs a scuzzy tattoo parlor out of his trailer. He has friends — William H. Macy plays Link's AA sponsor — but not many. And he hasn't seen his daughter (The Boys' Erin Moriarty) for years when she suddenly shows up on his doorstep...with angry gangbangers right on her tail.
Naturally, it's up to Link to keep his kid safe. It's not long before Link's trailer is full of bullet holes and he's violating his parole in all kinds of gnarly, gruesome ways. Blood Father is basically a play on the same formula that made Extraction so successful: A grizzled, tough-as-nails father figure protecting a (mostly) innocent young person? Yeah, you've seen that one before.
This film is gritty and mean and more than a little meta. All in all, Blood Father is a delightfully nasty piece of work. As an action star, few do it better than Gibson.
Burn Out
Extraction's most impressive sequence is arguably its 12-minute chase scene, which director Sam Hargrave cleverly staged so that it looks like it's unfolding in one long, unbroken take. Nothing in Burn Out is anywhere close to as impressive technically, but if you're yearning for the same sense of speed, this little French thriller might just scratch that itch.
In Burn Out, prolific French actor François Civil stars as Tony, a forklift driver who dreams of becoming a professional motorcycle racer. He quickly adds a third job to his resume, too: drug runner. See, Tony's ex-wife owes a local gangster a considerable sum of money. In order to work off her debt, Tony begins working as a courier who must race against the clock while delivering narcotics all around the city.
Naturally, balancing a full-time job, a nascent racing career, and drug smuggling ends up being too much for Tony. As such, it's not too long before things take a deadly turn — very, very quickly. Burn Out is fast. Not only is Yann Gozlan's direction smooth and stylish, but the movie itself moves at a breakneck pace. There isn't really time to get bored by any of the tropes you've seen in other films. The motorcycle chases are what you're really here for, and on that front, Burn Out delivers.
The Decline
Forget the helicopters, the explosions, the car crashes, and the death-defying stunts. When it comes down to it, the best action movies are about conflicts between people. John McClane versus Hans Gruber. Furiosa versus Immortan Joe. James Bond versus Blofeld. Tyler Rake versus Amir Asif.
That's why The Decline works. The lean Quebec thriller strips away most of the trappings of big-budget action movies, as most of the movie takes place in a remote mountain compound. Then it pits two teams of survivalists against each other in a brutal fight for survival. Initially, Réal Bossé's Alain simply wants to teach his band of ex-soldiers, hunters, survivalists, and paramilitary enthusiasts how to survive the apocalypse he knows is coming. However, when a body drops, Alain becomes worried that he'll lose his training camp and get sent to prison. His solution? Kill anyone who wants to tattle, and figure out the rest later.
What follows is a bloody game of cat-and-mouse out in the Quebec wilderness, in which one side will do anything they can to escape, and the other will pay any cost to keep them quiet. It's a sparse movie, but an exciting one.