Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
In this Chris Hemsworth vehicle, the son of an Indian drug lord is kidnapped by a rival Bangladeshi drug lord. A small team of specialists is hired to get him back, rather than pay any ransom, headed by Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake. While he’s able to take the kid from his captors, there’s some double crossing afoot, forcing Rake to bust out of Dhaka solo through the medium of murdering several hundred police officers.
I mean, there’s a little more to it than that, but not much more, and certainly nothing that isn’t out of Baby’s First Book of Cliches and Genre Tropes. For example, so confident is Joe Russo’s script of being utterly generic that Rake’s obligatory troubled backstory is only vaguely hinted at through blurry flashbacks and dreams, with you left to fill the details in yourself.
I made a note of the point at which I realised that I did not care one jot about anything on the screen, that being 28 minutes in. While there’s perhaps some humanity early on in the film, when we briefly get to know Rudhraksh Jaiswal’s Ovi Mahajan Jr, the kidnapped kid, after he’s taken he may as well be replaced by a rucksack that’s flung pillar to post by Rake. Rake is, almost by design, so overwhelmingly default that interest will refuse to adhere to him, and, well who cares about the tribulations of drug dealers?
I had a slight glimmer of hope later on when David Harbour shows up, as Hemsworth’s shown plenty of charisma in previous roles that I would have thought there’s potential for these two to play off each other, but, sadly, no, these scenes are just as predictable as everything else in the movie.
The car chases and shootouts that compose a solid 80% of the film are, to be fair, pretty well handled on a technical level, but as stated multiple times by this point, they are happening to people that I give not a solitary fig about, and so they all fall rather flat. Not least because of the number of surely innocent policemen that Rake mercilessly slaughters – we’re not suppose to feel sorry for them because the chief of police is in the drug lord’s pocket, but it’s quite a stretch to assume that everyone under him is also on board the evil train. Like everything else in the film, we are expected not to think about it too much.
This has, at least according to Netflix been a huge success, by whatever metric they measure success. This must surely be a commentary on the boredom imposed by lockdowns rather than any sort of vote of approval for this characterless, bland, sub-Call of Duty cutscene of film that I simply cannot imagine anyone caring about in the slightest. Netflix’s search for a competent action series much continue. 6 Underground at least had a bit of personality – this film, and in particular in the very last scene of this film, can go get bent so hard that it forms a pretzel.