By Eric Eisenberg
To put it simply, Extract is a movie about dumb people. This is not an attempt to insult the film or even its characters. It is simply what Mike Judge knows. Bevis and Butthead was about two dumb teenagers who watch entirely too much television. King of the Hill is about a neighborhood of dumb Texans just trying to live a working life. Office Space is about dumb computer programmers who are bored. Idiocracy is about future dumb people. And in that same vain, Extract is a movie about dumb people who work at a company that produces flavor extracts.
The film follows Joel (Jason Bateman), who, despite running a successful company, can’t get anything right in his life. His neighbor (David Koechner) is a talkative nuisance that continues to chit-chat through closed doors, he is sexually frustrated by a wife (Kristen Wiig) who has sweatpants that act as a chastity belt, his best friend is a stoner bartender (Ben Affleck) who hurts more than he helps and one of his best workers, named Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), loses a testicle during an on-site incident directly linked to employee incompetence.
Things go from bad to worse, however, when a beautiful con-artist, Cindy (Mila Kunis), comes to town, flirts with Joel, and convinces Step to sue Joel’s company. Wanting to ease his frustration and not wanting to feel guilty about cheating on his wife, Joel decides to hire a gigolo (Dustin Milligan) as his pool cleaner, only to find out Cindy won’t sleep with him.
Just as he did on the brilliant-but-cancelled Arrested Development, Bateman excels in playing the discontented alpha who has to deal with everyone else’s problems including his own, but the script doesn’t allow nearly enough time for the tremendous supporting cast. By the end of the film, Affleck has completely disappeared despite being an absolute scene-stealer in the opening half, and for most of the movie, Wiig is merely a set piece, providing one line of dialogue when Joel returns from work before the film fast forwards and leaves her behind.
The place where the movie succeeds is in its infuriating and bothersome characters, most notably Koechner’s neighbor character, Nathan, and Mary (Beth Grant), one of Joel’s employees. Perhaps aided by past experience, both actors excelling in the character type in previous roles, the two characters make your skin absolutely crawl and silently beg for the worst things to happen to them. Be it Nathan’s constant requests to go to the local rotary club with Joel and his wife or Mary’s insistence that other employee is stealing from her, it is hard to resist throwing your bucket of popcorn at the screen.
While the film is funny in spots, the overall film has a pacing problem, pushing all the funny lines into certain scenes while others remain dry with exposition and character development. While the story comes from Joel’s life falling to pieces, it is his interactions with the lesser characters that make the humor and those scenes tend to either be too short or far between.
Office Space, arguably Mike Judge’s best film, was successful because of the reliability of its content: anyone who has ever worked in an office has met every character from that film. While the same elements of aggravation and frustration are present, Extract fails to hit home in the same way. Does the film have its laughs? Absolutely. Will it be as good if not better than most of the comedies that will come out this month? Undoubtedly. But is Judge capable of a better film? We’ve seen it.
© Eric Eisenberg, All Rights Reserved