Extraction 2 is equipped with some of the most brutal kills you’ll see at the movies this year – but director Sam Hargrave couldn’t keep all the bloodshed.
In the first movie, Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake didn’t f*ck around: he shot a lot of people in the head, crushed someone’s windpipe with a mug, Sparta-kicked a table into another person’s head and one person so hard into a brick wall that it actually cracked, and lived up to his namesake by shoving a man’s face into the upturned prongs of a rake.
In our review, we said the sequel “ups the ante with affectingly breathless and bloody flair… put Just Cause, Warzone, and John Wick in a blender and you’ll get a head-rocking pint of Extraction 2, a strong contender for the Friday-night-with-a-beer-movie of the year.”
The carnage is delicious, and there’s plenty of it, but it turns out there is a limit on violence in the world of Extraction – at least for now.
Extraction 2 kills were too brutal for the movie
We sat down with director Sam Hargrave ahead of the release of Extraction 2 on Netflix, and we honed in on one particular scene in the film: the gym kills, where Tyler Rake crushes a man’s head with a weight rack and slams another guy into a treadmill so hard that he flies backwards through a window and onto the floor beneath him.
We asked how hard it was to not give into temptation and just spend half another of runtime watching Rake murking Georgian goons left, right, and center with workout equipment. “It’s challenging because, in the final product of the movie, a lot of stuff ends up on the editing room floor, right?” he explained.
“The stunt team gets in there and they see a room like that and – myself included – we look and go, ‘What are the thousand ways you can kill somebody with all this different gear? How do we curate that and pick the most exciting ones or the freshest ones?’ And then it’s my job [to decide] and also to keep it an exciting sequence that’s manageable time-wise… this only one small part of a two-hour movie. Hopefully, we chose well.”
Hargrave was open to pretty much anything, but some kills were considered a bit much for the movie. “There were suggestions to use a barbell as a spear. We were gonna use one of the weight plates as a Captain America shield and throw it and get a guy in the throat,” he said.
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“You know, all of those things are cool and they’d be fun if in a different movie – or maybe in another Extraction movie, who knows – but we tried to temper our childlike excitement in that world because there’s so many opportunities.”
Extraction 2 kills were inspired by fail videos
Hargrave then revealed the surprising source of inspiration many of the sequel’s stunts: YouTube fail videos. “It’s amazing where you can find inspiration nowadays for action,” he said.
“Everything’s being filmed now. So, people are running on the treadmill and for some reason filming themselves, but then it’s going too fast so they trip and now they’re doing a scorpion and they fly back into the wall. And you go, ‘Wow, that’s interesting. How can we incorporate something like that into a movie?’
“Sometimes, one person’s misfortune is another person’s entertainment [laughs]… the internet just keeps giving.”
Of course, Hargrave is a seasoned action viewer. When asked to pick his favorite action movies, he called it an “impossible question”, like trying to pick one ice cream. He grew up watching Die Hard, True Lies, and Rambo was a particularly “huge influence” on him – but only the first three. “We don’t count the rest, but one, two, and three were incredible,” he said.
Outside the “American canon”, Hargrave has also been influenced by Hong Kong cinema featuring Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Sammo Hung. “All of those Hong Kong films inspired me because of the physicality and the wild stunts they would do, because they were trying to compete with the Hollywood VFX movies and they couldn’t, so they’re like, ‘Hey, can we fall off of that? Can we do something spectacular with our bodies?’ And they did some amazing things, and that inspires me to this day.”
Extraction 2 is streaming on Netflix now. Check out our other coverage below:
