“Extraction”, a thriller set in Dhaka, has angered Bangladeshis

BANGLADESHIS CAN count on one hand the number of times their country has featured in a Hollywood film. So when it was announced that a blockbuster set in Dhaka, the capital, was to be released on Netflix, Bangladesh was abuzz with anticipation. When “Extraction” launched on the streaming service on April 24th, however, Dhaka’s starring role resulted not in pride but indignation. It may also have left some government officials feeling more than a little exposed.

The story follows Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth, pictured), a hardened mercenary who is employed to retrieve the kidnapped son of an Indian drug-lord from a Bangladeshi rival. Almost all the action unfolds in Dhaka yet none of the filming took place in the south Asian megacity. Instead, Chris Hargreave, a first-time director but seasoned stunt coordinator, chose to shoot in Ahmedabad and Mumbai in India and Bangkok in Thailand.

Bar a few details—such as the green auto rickshaws which whiz down every road—the fictional Dhaka bears little resemblance to its real-life counterpart. The gangsters’ slum lair is improbably spacious, and when the characters’ fighting tears through flats, their occupants are listening to out-of-date Bollywood music and wearing saris tied in an Indian fashion. Only a few of the actors playing Bangladeshis, none of whom actually hail from Bangladesh, are able to speak Bangla convincingly. “It’s like watching a film set in London, about Londoners, but all the characters sound French,” grimaces one disappointed Dhakaite.

Scripted by Joe and Anthony Russo, the brothers responsible for “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame”, “Extraction” boasts impressive stunts and fight sequences, but it also recycles tired Hollywood tropes about poor countries. Mr Hemsworth plays an archetypal white saviour—albeit one with a sad backstory—killing corrupt foreign baddies. A yellow filter has been used to film the fictional Dhaka, a murky wash often meant to crassly signpost poverty. There is no hint that the Bangladeshi economy has been growing at a rapid clip for more than a decade, and that millions have been lifted out of poverty. The portrayal of Bangladesh as an extension of India is equally crude.

Yet “Extraction” has irked some in Bangladesh not only because of what it gets wrong, but because of what it gets right. A drug-dealer ordering a colonel from an “elite” security force to shut the city, as happens at the start of the film, is farcical. If an officer had demanded a cut of the drug-dealer’s takings and shot him for refusing, though, it would not have been so far-fetched. “The chain of the command is wrong,” says a Bangladeshi journalist who prefers to remain anonymous, “but the corruption is too right.” In Bangladesh, where methamphetamine, trafficked from neighbouring Myanmar, has spawned a multimillion-dollar business, some members of law enforcement agencies have developed “unholy alliances” with drug-dealers, says one military official, who is unnerved by the portrayal of corruption in “Extraction”.

The film’s depiction of rampant state violence lands even closer to home. The Rapid Action Battalion, on which the “elite” force in “Extraction” seems to be modelled, routinely goes on killing sprees. Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group, published a report in December claiming that in 2019 “security forces persisted with a long-standing pattern of covering up unlawful killings by claiming deaths occurred during a gun-fight or in crossfire. Hundreds were killed in alleged ‘crossfire’ exchanges including during a drive against recreational drugs.” Almost 500 alleged drug-traffickers and dealers were killed in “crossfire” in 2018 and 300 last year. Some government insiders refer to these rampages as “police housekeeping”: crooked officers trying to bump off criminal cronies who may implicate them. Gangsters who are politically well-connected are normally left unscathed.

Drug-dealers are not the only victims of the state-sponsored violence. Dissenting journalists or activists have been assaulted or have disappeared. Security forces, charged of late with enforcing the lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, have been using their batons and fists to do so, while government officials, backed by their henchmen, are pocketing rice meant for the poor.

Now more than ever, Bangladesh’s authorities are eager to draw attention away from their insalubrious exploits. Through its blundering and clichéd depiction of violent corruption, “Extraction” has unwittingly hit them where it hurts most and, by a quirk of fate, when it matters most.

“Extraction” is streaming on Netflix now