About halfway through Extraction 2, I realized no one was sweating. Not a drop. Bone dry, unless they had blood on their faces. This, despite an hour of running and jumping and punching and wearing heavy clothing while doing it. Now, this is going to seem like a petty gripe for a minute, but hear what I’m saying:
Extraction 2 is the sequel to 2020’s Extraction, a Netflix movie that was very successful according to Netflix. Chris Hemsworth plays a mercenary named Tyler Rake, and we see at the beginning that he survived being killed at the end of the previous film, which is admittedly a pretty impressive thing to do. Now, his ex-wife’s sister is being held with her children against her will in a Georgian prison, and it’s up to Tyler to rescue them. He goes and does the thing, with the help of some friends, and the rest of the movie is action action action, as some Georgian gangsters aren’t too happy with Tyler.
But somehow, no one sweats. This isn’t unique to this movie, no one in action movies sweats as much as they ought to given what they’re doing, but there was a time when they would at least glisten, if not outright pour buckets—we could at least acknowledge that these are supposed to be people, albeit enormous, muscley, unkillable people. And this is the bigger problem: we may not be looking for reality in our action movies, but we’ve gone so far down the superhero hole that nothing feels even vaguely real. There’s nothing that feels like you could touch it or smell it. We’re watching a video game glossy version of an action movie, even if in this case it’s a gritty glossy version, as the movie maintains the current trend of action movies relying so heavily on cruelty and pain. The only body fluid that exists in movies now is blood.
A lot of people will watch Extraction 2, or at least Netflix will tell us that, and I get it. But me, I miss action movies that give us something to feel with our hands. I miss action movies that smell bad.
Extraction 2 is on Netflix.
