By: John M Jerva
If you follow my website, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart if you do, then you know last Friday, in my opinion, one of the best action films that I’ve seen in a while hit Netflix and it’s name is Extraction. You can read my review in the link below but I basically say that this is the film where Chris Hemsworth cements his action hero status and the film itself from director Sam Hargrave is “an action master class.”
I don’t usually do spoilers in my reviews but if you did see the film then you know the ending was a little cryptic. That’s all I’ll say on the subject. But there is a possibility that we will get a sequel or prequel in the future and Director Sam Hargrave said it could focus on Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake and David Harbour’s Gaspar.
A new interview from Collider breaks open the conversation on Hemsworth’s character of Tyler Rake David Harbour’s Gaspar and what kind of history they share.
In the interview Hargrave stated: “We thought it was necessary in that moment, to justify the use of deadly force by Ovi (Jaiswal), to put Rake (Hemsworth) in a compromised position where his life was in danger. It did come up; we discussed how is [Gaspar] gonna beat [Tyler Rake]. We discussed it and our backstory is that those two guys — and, spoiler alert, who knows whether there could be prequels or sequels could possibly go if Netflix likes the movie —but their backstory is these guys trained together and they spent a lot of time together in the military and even outside of that, in private military sector, and their skills would be matched but they just went in different directions. Harbour[‘s character] ‘went native,’ you might say. He found a life in Bangladesh and stayed there and Rake kept going down that [other] path. But their skillset, if you matched them up, they’re kind of evenly matched. So, to make up for the fact that Rake has been doing [this work] consistently and Harbour[‘s character] has not, we made sure that Chris had enough damage, if he was beaten down enough, we’d believe that Harbour had the skills to take him down.”
Then Hargrave filled us in on the possibility of a follow up: “There’s a lot of potential; it’s so interesting. And again, the beauty of an ambiguous ending is that there’s a lot of ways you can go. You can go forwards or backwards. Either way you look on the timeline are very interesting stories,”
He mentioned on whether or not a follow up has been discussed and Hargrave filled in some gaps about what has transpired up to this point.
“It wasn’t something [discussed] on set. As soon as it got mentioned, that thought of a sequel — because, I guess, Netflix was enjoying the dailies and things were coming together and people were like, ‘Oh, this could be…’. You know, you talk about all these things. Is it a franchise? Is it all these things? Who knows until the movie comes out and the audience responds. They’ll be the ones who decide. But it was talked about. As soon as it was, Joe brought up an interesting point that most of the time, you get a sequel. Rarely do you go back in time into prequels. […] You get the sense that Chris and Harbour have a great chemistry […] so we thought that was a very interesting way — if you were to go backwards in time — that you could play with the prequel to a story like this.”
Producer Joe Russo simply said “maybe” to the idea but did elaborate on how much Netflix loved the finished film.
“[Netflix was] very happy with the film and very supportive of it. They’ve been phenomenal to work with. Certainly, when you find an interesting character and an interesting world to explore with a great director, you’re going to want to continue to explore it. My brother and I love franchise filmmaking, we love serialized storytelling. I just think you can do interesting things with characters as you progress their story. You’re limited by two hours, you can only say so much, it’s a very specific craft. When you expand the amount of time you put that character onscreen, you can make other choices with them. So, it would be exciting at hell to go back to work on a second film in that series. We’ve had the preliminary conversations. The question is: Does it all make sense? Can we find the right story to tell? Are we happy to go tell that? Does Sam want to tell that story? Does Chris want to tell that story? There’s still a lot of work to be done.”
So in other words, who knows at this point but if you saw the movie then you know the ending is left to make us think more after the credits role. Whether Tyler Rake returns in a prequel or sequel doesn’t matter to me. I just want one ASAP as the movie is one of the best adrenalized action flicks around today and it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as John Wick and The RAID. I know people disagree but that’s why I love doing this because everyone has a distinct opinion on the subject of action movies and I open my site up to all good discussions.
I would love to see this become a franchise for Netflix and I hope it paves the way for more action spectacles like this one. Sure it’s not a perfect movie and it’s plot is simple but like I said it’s all about the action.
Check out my full review down below along with one from resident contributor The Cinema Drunkie!!!
Extraction is now streaming on Netflix!
Source: Collider- https://collider.com/extraction-sequel-netflix-prequel-details-sam-hargrave-joe-russo/
ACTION-FLIX 
