The number of laughs you extract from Extract depends, appropriately enough, on just how hard you have to work to enjoy them.
Too hard, it turns out.
Mike Judge’s Office Space became a DVD cult hit far beyond its worth as a theatrical movie. Perhaps the same thing will happen with his Extract, which is kind of a blue-collar companion piece to its white-collar predecessor, but from a boss’s point-of-view instead of that of a worker.
Judge, the creator of TV’s Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, seems much more comfortable in animation. So it may not be a surprise that Extract is cartoonish to a fault.
Jason Bateman stars as mild-mannered Joel Reynold, the owner of a modest flavor-extract plant in the suburbs that manufactures the artificial flavoring that he invented. He hopes to retire after selling his company to General Mills, which is very definitely interested.
But he has come to suspect that his wife, a coupon designer played by Kristen Wiig, is not only indifferent to his charms but actively unfaithful. He also can’t help but notice Cindy, the attractive new temp played by Mila Kunis.
Joel’s advice-dispensing buddy, a bartender played by Ben Affleck, convinces Joel to hire a brain-dead gigolo (Dustin Milligan) to seduce his wife for two reasons: to prove that his suspicions about her infidelity are justified and to allow him to pursue the fetching temp guilt-free.
But what Joel doesn’t know is that manipulative kleptomaniac Cindy, responding to a newspaper article she read, has applied for the job so that she can convince a fellow employee (Cliff Collins, Jr.) to take advantage of the industrial accident he recently suffered in a freak assembly-line accident by bringing a lawsuit against Joel’s company, helped by ambulance-chasing lawyer Gene Simmons, that would result in its bankruptcy and scotch the imminent sale to General Mills.
Writer-director Judge (Idiocracy), working from his own sketchy and disjointed screenplay, wrings a few laughs out of the moronic behavior of his one-note characters. Stupidity is pretty much the norm. But, as is Judge’s wont, the stubbornly laid-back narrative never picks up a head of steam.
As for the acting, it’s admittedly competent, but still cannot divert us from the underdeveloped script’s failings.
As he demonstrated in TV’s Arrested Development and his modest movie career, the affable Bateman (State of Play, Hancock, Juno) is not only likable on-screen but about as talented a light comedian as we have. And his lead character is a slight voice-of-reason variation of his Michael Bluth protagonist in Arrested Development. But too often we want to lift his character right out of Extract and drop him in another movie just to see if he might flourish in better surroundings.
The vanilla Extract is a workplace comedy that doesn’t quite work.
Bill Wine - Celebrity News Service Movie Critic
91 minutes
In theaters September 4, 2009
Rating: R, Comedy
Editors Note: Mike Judge can be an acquired taste: I haven’t seen Extract yet, but I’m betting like a good Kevin Smith movie I might live it.
