Quarantine has a funny effect on people. Some shave their heads or grow beards, others take up new hobbies. For me, I have a constant craving for big, loud action movies. There’s something innocent about them, and I like the way they snap you into the moment and don’t allow you to think about anything else. The noise and sensory overload, the way they tickle the lizard brain, just feels good right now. Especially car chases with lots of explosions. If you’re flipping sedans and throwing things off an overpass, you are currently my jam.
As if they read my mind, Netflix just dropped the Chris Hemsworth action vehicle “Extraction,” which looks like (and is) a blend of “Man on Fire” with “John Wick.” The Russo Brothers–of “Avengers: Endgame” fame–wrote it, and its director is a veteran Hollywood stunt guy, which is the new trendy hire for action movies. Its setup is as cliche as the day is long: tortured soldier with nothing to live for, haunted by his past mistakes, gets a shot at redemption and blah blah blah. We really do need a new backstory for our action heroes.
But! Once you swallow that, things get real good, real fast. They know why you’re here, and your time is not wasted. The action is plentiful and uniformly excellent, especially a twelve minute jaw-dropper in the middle of the movie that is so phenomenal the movie struggles to get out of its shadow afterwards. I can’t say enough about this sequence. It’s a modern action classic. I’m so glad stunt work is making a comeback in American action cinema, because it is the lifeblood of good action.
“Extraction” also takes a swing at building out some interesting ensemble characters, and it does… better than I expected. David Harbour shows up and gets some fun stuff to chew on. There’s a child soldier character who gets more care than you might expect; his story’s left a little unfinished, but it’s still a nice touch. But these detours are lean and the story keeps its motor on at all times, which is good.
A lot of people blast “Extraction” as cliche and lame. Which I guess is true, but I always want to say to these people… what did you expect? You saw the cover art, right? Did it look like they were going for “Hamlet?” Action movies like this are supposed to be a bit cliche and lame. I’m not hitting “Play” and hoping for a careful examination of family dynamics in modern suburbs. Dragging an action movie for cliche is like going to an AC/DC concert and complaining that there’s too many songs about partying. You’re just willfully refusing to get in the spirit of what’s happening.
You know what? The more I think about it… everything is cliche, and calling something cliche is inherently hypocritical. Your favorite movie is cliche, and so is mine. Critics love Noah Baumbach, but technically, his movies are rife with the cliches of that genre. Difficult, socially maladjusted white men are a turbo-cliche, but when Paul Thomas Anderson does it for the twentieth time, people line up to call it genius. There is no such thing as a genre without narrative guard rails, expected plot beats, and story conventions. And while you might bend over backwards trying to explain why the cliches in the thing you love are not as bad as the ones in the thing you don’t, that’s purely subjective, and someone with different tastes will totally disagree.
I hate it when people call things “cliche.” I really do. It’s the most obnoxious criticism on Earth. It’s always accompanied by a kind of sneer. When people say it, it feels like they’re peacocking their elevated palette to you. It’s the movie critic version of a baboon flaunting its red butt. Which would be annoying anyway, but once you realize that everyone just lines up for another dose of whatever cliche happens to work for them, the hypocrisy becomes unbearable. It is exactly like standing in a line at Starbucks (remember standing in lines? siiiiiighhhh) and talking trash at anyone who ordered something different from you.
Now! I recognize that just a few paragraphs ago, I myself called “Extraction” “cliche.” I considered deleting that once I got rolling on this tangent, but you know what? I’m not going to. Because A) I’m just as guilty of this as everyone, and B) it’s an opportunity to reflect on why I went down that road. When I wrote “cliche,” what I was really trying to articulate was that the backstory they gave Chris Hemsworth’s character didn’t make me feel anything. I wasn’t touched by it, and I think they wanted me to be. I chose the word “cliche” because I implicitly assumed this failure was because it was similar to other things I’d seen. But that may or may not be true. The more I think about it, even if I’d never seen a tortured hero with a dead child backstory before, I still don’t think this would’ve worked. I misdiagnosed my own symptoms.
What is true, and what I should’ve said, was that the backstory did not work for me; repeat exposure to similar stories didn’t have anything to do with it. By calling “Extraction” “cliche,” I was implying that the execution was flawless but too familiar, and therefore it did not work, but had I thought about it, I’d have realized how dumb that is. Cliches don’t care how many times you’ve seen them, only how well they’re done. I recently watched Pixar’s “Onward,” which, like all Pixar movies, is drowning in cliche. But my brain never fired the “cliche!!!” signal, because the script was excellently written, and I believed in the characters and the story. Also, and no one wants to admit this, but cliches feel good. They’re there because they work, and we like them more than we think. If we didn’t, the James Bond movies would’ve died off years ago. I’ve seen that dude order a martini, drive an Aston Martin, and sleep with someone he shouldn’t about a thousand times. Why do I want to see him do it again? Because I like it, and it is a cliche.
The word “cliche,” I realize, is a defense mechanism. It’s an attempt to affix an objective reality to a subjective experience. If you just say “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it,” it feels soft, but “cliche” is a statement of fact. It can’t be negotiated. Cliche is a matter of numbers: how many other movies have done this, how recently? To prove my point, try this experiment out: the next time someone calls something “cliche,” respond “No, I don’t think that is a cliche.” My suspicion is that person will be flummoxed. They might come back at you with a few “come on”s, maybe an “are you serious,” and then they might start laying out all the other movies that have done something similar. Because in their mind, they just stated an immutable truth of the universe, and you’re contradicting it. That’s the appeal of “cliche.” It elevates opinion into fact.
As an aside, I have a creeping feeling that someone might use this to throw shade at the investigation of tropes and stereotypes in media. Let me head that off at the pass: that is a completely different thing. Someone investigating how, say, women are portrayed in video games isn’t trying to elevate their opinion into fact. They’re not really dealing in opinions at all. They are making provable factual statements about patterns in media. Calling some “cliche” is questioning its artistic merit because it’s been done before. Calling something a “trope” is interrogating why that pattern exists in the first place, and what its effect is. It’s more akin to a scientific study than a discussion of whether the new “Avengers” was cool or not.
Anyway…
I’m not saying the things we call “cliche” are magically good, and I’m definitely not arguing for being nice to everything ever made; a lot of art sucks (I’ve made some of it), and needs to be told so, and the art that’s great is done a disservice if it’s lumped in with the mediocrity. My point is that we’re being intellectually dishonest in how we express ourselves. We all devour cliches constantly, and we’re in no position to suddenly point the finger at others for doing the same. If you think something is stupid, say you think it’s stupid. But don’t fall into the trap of needing that to be true for other people. Because that is cliche.