WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW
Chris Hemsworth may not have a hammer this time around but he more than made up for it with his guns and unarmed combat skills in the action-packed Netflix thriller Extraction. But while the movie is loads of fun, its ambiguous ending has left a lot of people asking questions.
The 36-year-old actor has now decided to open up about the movie and the ultimate fate of his character.
In case you didn’t already know, Hemsworth plays Tyler Rake, a veteran mercenary still grieving over the loss of his son, who accepts a nearly-suicidal mission to rescue Ovi (Rudraksh Jaiswal), a young hostage who also happens to be the son of India’s biggest drug lord.
Its fast-paced action and unconventional plot twists have made the film one of the best performing films of Netflix. And now Hemsworth weighs in on the film’s ending.
With the help of Tyler’s team leader Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani), Ovi is successfully brought to safety but seemingly at the cost of Tyler’s life. Our hero is badly wounded and struggles to the side of the bridge where he takes one last look at Ovi before plunging down into the river hundreds of feet below.
Eight months later, Ovi is seen submerged in the pool at his school but as he breaks the surface, there is a blurred figure to the side wearing a cap. Viewers are now asking, is that Tyler Rake? Did he actually survive?
Many people would take note of Ovi telling Rake in a previous scene, “You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.” So one could assume that Rake decided to actually live.
Speaking to IGN, Hemsworth said: “I love the ambiguity there and the way you could interpret it however you like. I really like what you said there Joe [writer, Joe Russo] that it represents the boy’s gonna be okay, whether that’s the ghost of Rake watching over him or something, it represents someone still watching him and taking care of him – I like that version. Whether that’s actually him or not, we don’t know.”
Joe Russo admitted earlier in the interview that the ending was deliberately ambiguous so that viewers could decide for themselves whether or not Rake was still alive.
He explained: “What we love about that ending is, you can interpret it any way you want to, which is really, for us, it represents hope for the boy that he’s gonna have a future, you know, that that is the ghost of Rake that’s looking over him – it’s really what it means to him at the end of the movie more so than what it means to the audience.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with ambiguous endings, in fact, they can be quite entertaining and incite a lot of conversation which I always think is the value of a public medium like filmmaking, is that everyone can argue about it and discuss it ad nauseam – but unless there’s a prequel or a sequel, that question won’t be answered.
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So there you have it.
Despite the ambiguity of the ending, it didn’t stop Hemsworth from teasing the idea to fans on Instagram, saying: “I just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who checked out Extraction, you’ve made it the number one film on the planet right now, and it looks like it’s going to be Netflix’s biggest feature film of all time, which is absolutely mind-blowing.
“There’s been a lot of talk and questions about sequels and prequels and all sorts of things, and all I can say is – who knows? But with this amount of support, it’s something I will be pretty stoked to jump back into.”
Replaced!