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Is it worth $10? No
After the unexpected success of “Office Space” in 1999, many have wanted writer/director Mike Judge to return to the workplace. Let this be a reminder to be careful what we wish for. “Extract” isn’t terrible, but there’s not much of the topical factory-set humor many will be looking for, and overall the tone is a bit too heavy to allow the comedy to really work. You know a movie is in trouble when it’s only 90 minutes but feels a lot longer.
Jason Bateman stars as Joel Reynold, the owner of a food extract company whose wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) refuses to have sex. When a new temp named Cindy (Mila Kunis) flirts with him, Joel, with the help of his bartender friend Dean (Ben Affleck), hires a gigolo (Dustin Milligan) to seduce Suzie, which would free Joel of guilt if he hooked up with Cindy.
Things naturally don’t go as planned, and an accident at the factory that costs aspiring floor manager Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) one of his testicles means the business is facing a huge lawsuit. This is especially bad considering General Mills is interested in buying the company, but will not make an offer until Step’s lawyer (Gene Simmons, miscast) goes away.
There’s a lot of heavy emotional stuff here, and Judge never strikes the proper balance between comedy and drama. As a result, the very funny Kunis, Wiig and especially J.K. Simmons as the plant manager are criminally underused, and Bateman never figures out if he’s supposed to play a scene straight or for laughs. The best performance is actually Affleck’s, only because Dean is so one-dimensional we know not to take him seriously, even though Joel does.
It is Dean, you see, who always suggests drugs to solve Joel’s problems, and who accidentally gives Joel a horse tranquilizer while pitching his self-described “stroke of genius” idea of hiring someone to sleep with Suzie. The character reminded me of John Goodman’s turn in “The Big Lebowski,” in that Dean is a person who always thinks he has the right answer for Joel’s problems, and in acts of pure stupidity Joel gives in and everything becomes worse. To fix the problems he then returns to Dean, and so on.
“Office Space” worked because it clearly spoke to the senseless inanity of working in an office, from pointless memos to annoying, incompetent bosses to infuriating and malfunctioning printers. But “Extract” doesn’t have much to say about working in a factory, and as such it doesn’t give working men and women much to relate to. Instead it’s about adultery, lawsuits, drugs and unhappiness. In other words, if Judge extracted all the drama and just made a comedy about working in a factory, the movie would have been better off.
Did you know? Judge is also the creator of the long-running animated series “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill.” After “Office Space” Judge wrote 40 pages of “Extract” before his representatives convinced him to do something more commercial. The misguided “Idiocracy” (2006) was the result of that new direction.
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