When Office Space blind-sided us back in 1999 with it's hilarious but insightful look at the daily minutia and malaise of the common office employee, it sparked a revolution. Not just in people who had become fed up with merely "getting through the day" at their boring places of employment, but for creator Mike Judge as well. He went on to craft some of the most brilliant pieces of comedy ever, in particular Idiocracy and the TV show King of the Hill(I hate Beavis & Butthead, sorry). Judge's latest comedy, Extract, lacks any of the intelligence of his previous films. That would be excusable if the film were...let's say...funny? But it's not. And so the moronic escapades of it's barely fleshed out characters feel like just another day at the old grind.
Jason Bateman plays Joel, the owner of a flavor extracting factory. Joel's life kinda sucks. I mean he's rich and all, but he wants to sell his company...for some reason, boredom I guess. His wife Suzie(Kristen Wiig, goin' to waste) won't have sex after 8pm once the dreaded sweatpants come on. The staff at his facility are a bunch of lazy, perpetually angry buffoons, not the least of which is the senior member of the staff, a bozo named Step(Clifton Collins, goin' to waste). A workplace incident involving rocketing bottlecaps leads to Step losing one of his precious jewels, which also means a lawsuit is afoot. Around this time Joel hires a sexy new worker, Cindy(the barely present Mila Kunis), who he instantly makes a connection with. Feeling lost, Joel turns to his bushy slacker bud, Dean(Ben Affleck), who convinces him to hire someone to seduce Suzie so that Joel can freely sleep with Cindy. Why would he agree to this? Alcohol and tranquilizers, the breakfast of champions.
As much as I hate comparing a creator's works to eachother, it's impossible not to do so with Extract. Hell, they want you to compare. The trailers and TV spots proudly proclaim "the man behind Office Space goes back to work"! They might want to tone that rhetoric down a little bit, because these films have absolutely nothing in common. If the goal was to do for the corporate heirarchy what was done for the common worker in Office Space, then Judge failed miserably. Joel has no real problems. His biggest problem is that he has to get home by 8pm or no sex? Dude, leave work earlier! He does it often enough throughout the film for other reasons, how about you go home and nail your wife. Problem solved.
Extract misses the mark in nearly every conceivable way. The script isn't dark...nor is it bouncy...it's just sorta blah. Ther's nothing particularly funny about a guy scammin' on his wife and trying to sell his company out from under his employees. The amazingly talented cast are given nothing to do. Kunis barely shows her face; the always reliable J.K. Simmons might as well have called in his performance from the golf course; and Ben Affleck feels like he walked in from some other movie. I'm trying desperately hard to figure out what the point of Extract was, but why bother? Why should I put more thought into this movie when Mike Judge clearly didn't think it was necessary for him to do so?
4/10
