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'Extract' is strictly vanilla
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Jason Bateman and Clifton Collins Jr. looking for laughs in 'Extract'
EXTRACT
Rating: ** (out of five)
Mike Judge is hard to figure. The guy busted through back in the early 1990s with Beavis and Butthead, that borderline pop culture masterpiece that gave absurdo voice to a generation of bored, hyper latchkey kids. He also brought us Office Space, the workplace comedy that was met with yawns when released a decade ago but has morphed into a touchstone late 20th century classic - at least if "classic" status can be judged by sheer number of airings on weekend cable TV.
So that's the good. The bad from Judge has included Idiocracy, a fairly wretched piece of movie cynicism that has lately been championed as "underappreciated" - as if it could be anything but. There's also King of the Hill, the animated Fox sitcom that has somehow run for 15 seasons without ever making anyone laugh. The show finally goes off the respirator when Fox airs its final episode later this month - raise your hand if you even knew it was still around.
Now comes Extract, Judge's third time around as a film director. Replace the flourescent-lighted cubicles of Office Space with flourescent-lighted factory lines, and you get the idea. But Extract is neither as memorable as its thematic predecessor nor as misguided as Idiocracy - it exists squarely on that most comfortable rung of the American corporate ladder: the mediocre middle.
Jason Bateman does what he can as Joel, the movie's central character, who owns his own extract business, though no one really seems to care, most notably his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig). One of the movie's funnier bits has Joel scurrying home at the end of each workday trying to be through the door before Suzie pulls the drawstring tight on her comfortable sweatpants - the irreversible signal that he won't be getting any action that night. He's on a long, long streak of such nights, he tells his drug-addled bartender buddy Dean, played by Ben Affleck as a low-rent Jeff Lebowski.
When Joel starts to notice Cindy (Mila Kunis) a fetching, troubled new temp at the factory, Dean offers some truly stupefying advice: Pay a gigolo to seduce Suzie, and if she falls for it, then Joel has the green light to sleep with Cindy. Or something like that. In the hands of different filmmakers, say the Coen Brothers, that's a plot that could have had potential. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that, despite his eager and mostly funny leads, Judge just isn't up to the task. Beyond the movie's first few promising scenes, there just isn't much there. Office Space had a consistent theme and tone: bored detachment in the face of futile office politics. No such consistency runs through Extract - no such laughs, either.
Check out Beavis and Butthead previewing 'Extract' (trust me, it's funnier than the movie):
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