The original iteration of this blog featured regular movie reviews, so I thought, in the spirit of getting back to my writing roots, I’d try my hand at those again. Then I remembered that I am the mother of small children and watch one non-Pixar movie every calendar year, so instead I’m going to review trailers of movies I’ll never watch, starting with Extraction.
The first thing the Extraction trailer needs you to understand is that Chris Hemsworth is Not Like Us. We spend our days watching Netflix trailers, wearing shirts with sleeves, and occasionally dragging our doughy bodies off the couch to accept Hello Fresh deliveries. Extraction Chris Hemsworth, by contrast, cliff dives from unsurvivable heights, sits at the bottom of rivers, and meditates underwater with his eyes open. He has culturally ambiguous tattoos curving up his deltoids, either takes naps or does crunches in the jungle, and leaves his watch on when he goes swimming. He can foot sweep some people and kill some others with garden implements.
He’s not like you, you couch-bound slob, and that’s why you’re going to watch this loosely coherent star vehicle by the people who brought you Endgame.
The second thing the Extraction trailer needs you to understand is that Extraction is a great name for this movie, despite not a single oral surgeon or aesthetician joining C-Hems in his vinyasa base jumping from the opening. A lady with a sensible bob and an ambiguous accent gets on the exposition phone to tell CH he has to take some kid out of some bad place—you know, like extract him. To cut down on the exposition, the bad place has been filmed with the Toaster Instagram filter, so no one has to tell us it is not America, nor that it is chock-full of drugs, corruption, and dangerous American ex-pats in white linen jackets.
The rest of what the trailer needs us to know can be covered with a rapid-fire montage of helicopters! People aiming weapons! And a backwards car chase in a family sedan! Cue the title cards and a few more WAAAMPs from the soundtrack and we’re just one click away from escaping the unbearable tedium of our daily lives for two hours.
…Oh, but wait! It appears that, as a reward for having enough cardiac health to have survived the first half of the trailer, the producers have decided to just show you the rest of the movie!
Huh. Yes, we’re still going, and now Sensible Bob Assassin gets back on the exposition horn to tell us the mission is “fahkt tilah,” which I assume is a local cuisine made with grenade launchers. Another white guy with a beard wants Chris Hemsworth to kill the kid—bringing our total number of white guys with beards up to two in this trailer, which is a little much if you ask me—and then CH and the kid become friends.
Or at least I think they do, because another part of what makes Chris Hemsworth Not Like Us is that he brushes his teeth with Lidocaine, so I have no idea what he’s saying most of the time. He shows his new friend all his favorite things to do, including jumping out of cars, jumping off buildings, and, I assume, jumping off cliffs before the credits roll. There’s a final shot of someone blowing smoke—literal smoke, not “your accent is sooooo easy to understand” type of smoke—in Chris Hemsworth’s general direction, he mumbles something else unintelligible, and then it’s over.
So.
If the measure of a good movie trailer is whether it makes you want to watch the movie, then we’re going to have to take two separate measurements. The first half of the trailer? Crushed it. I’m sick of myself, you’re sick of yourself, why not watch someone unlike you fire massive military-grade weapons at lines of vehicles for two hours?
The second half of the trailer is more of an exercise in self-defeat. In our quarantine atrophy, we’re going to need some curiosity to lend us the energy to click the Watch Now button, and this last minute doesn’t leave room for many questions. Everyone knows that Chris Hemsworth will save the kid, but what this trailer presupposes is… maybe he didn’t??
So in conclusion, for being satisfyingly explode-y but also overly long and formulaic, I give the Extraction trailer three and half Hello Fresh boxes out of five.
3.5/5
