Extraction 2: Chris Hemsworth gets his very own Bourne Supremacy

It’s hard to recall much about Extraction (2020) from the amnesiac haze of Lockdown One, except a much-hyped coup midway – one of those “pretending to be a single shot” jobs lasting about 12 minutes for a car chase. On either side, that burly Netflix creation, which kept Chris Hemsworth busy as a black-ops mercenary, was heaving its way around on steroids, with no chance of outdoing its flashy high-point.

Extraction 2 exceeds that peak and sensibly elongates it for as long as possible, while juggling a list of records that returning director Sam Hargrave aims to break for the action genre. Lo, it boasts more exploding helicopters than anything in memory, and definitely the most deaths using items of gym equipment. It must also mark the first, though hopefully not the last, film in which a businesslike Hemsworth batters thugs out of his way with a fist that’s literally on fire.

For an hour in the middle, the film’s commitment to dethroning Chuck Norris as cinema’s elite-commando king works like gangbusters, whether disguising the joins (as Hargrave does for a 21-minute getaway from a prison in Georgia) or opting not to. The flaunting of a “oner” (as the industry likes to call these fluid, 1917-style feats) may be an exercise in pure editorial machismo, but Hargrave is aware that you can still be a man and cut to a reverse shot once in a while.

Left for dead until he’s fished out of a river in Dhaka, Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake is a grey mess when we start, sequestered for recovery at a snowy cabin retreat with just a dog and some cheeky poultry for company. (It wouldn’t be much of a sequel to Extraction, but I’d probably watch a three-hour portrait of Rake’s retirement if Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan ever fancied a go.)

Cometh the hour, cometh the Rake. A cameoing Idris Elba rolls up, explaining that Tyler’s ex-wife’s sister Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili) and her two children are in dire need of rescue. All it takes is one token up-and-at-’em montage, and he’s ready to break these captives out from under the very nose of Ketevan’s also-imprisoned husband, one of two feared kingpin brothers known in Georgia as the “Nagazi”, whose heroin-and-guns operation has given them ludicrous military resources to match their toxic patriarchal rage.

What gives this impetus is its on-the-run takedown of such thuggery, not just by Hemsworth’s strong, silent type, but his thoughtful partner Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) and her brother Yaz (Harka’s Adam Bessa), in nicely expanded roles. They’re an engaging troika we root for, much as we do for the soul of Ketevan’s son Sandro (Andro Japaridze), torn in half by separation from his dad, and promised safety by his scary uncle, Zurab (Tornike Gogrichiani, superbly cast for his fusion of charisma and threat).

Hargrave finesses these dynamics to give us rock-solid motivation for who’s coming at whom, even if the beginning and end of his film are just a basic support system for everything he wants to let fly – and it really does fly – in the middle. The sum total is superior in every way to what he dished out last time. With a third one openly teased at the end, the fog has lifted: Hemsworth has landed on his Bourne, and this is his Supremacy.

No cert, 123 min. On Netflix now