“No matter how badass you are,” says a sage baddie in Extraction, “there’s always a bigger badass than you.” That’s sadly true for Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler🗹 Rake, whose shooty exploits beg comparison with the likes of Jason Bourne and John Wick, only to be outgunnꦿed.

Like the aforementioned, Rake’s a man of few words but multiple kill-skills, a black-market mercenary tearing up Bangladeshi capital Dhaka on a contract to save a crime lord’s kidnapped son (Rudraksh Jaiswal’s Ovi). No, the mission is not what i🌺t seems. Yes, there will be bonding. Alas, efforts to fuse Rake’s tragic past and Ovi’s apparently hopeless present into a redemptive arc are grounded in cliché, Joe Russoღ’s script falling short of its emotional target weight.

With both Russos on board as producers, first-time directorial duties fall to their regular MCU collaborator Sam Hargrave. There’s little the seasoned stunt coordinator can do to build Rake’s quirks – the name for the one thing; meditating 𝔍at the bottom of lakes for another – into the next great action antihero. But as you’d hope, Hargrave comes into his own with the ♕set-pieces. 

While the climactic bridge battle will sate fans of explosions (it’s the type of film ಞwhere everyone has a rocket launcher in their car boot) and splatty sound FX, the showstopper comes earlier: a turbo-charged, barrels-blazing, fists-flying pursuit that whips us in and out of cars in one impossibly long take. However much digi-gery-pokery was involved, the effect is vividly, vehicularly real. Odd moments linger elsewhere – David Harbou🐽r’s lairy cameo, some eye-watering self-surgery – but those minutes of mayhem are Extraction’s main takeaway.