Poor Jason Bateman is forced to listen to Ben Affleck in the disappointing new comedy Extract.
If there has ever been a director who deserves a break, it has to be Mike Judge. Since launching two iconic animated series, Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, Judge has earned the dubious distinction of earning such contempt from 20th Century Fox that it took extraordinary steps to bury his last two films. Despite later gaining considerable cult status, both Office Space and Idiocracy were denied full-scale distribution and the usual media hype that Fox routinely doles out for gems like Bride Wars.
As a director with a flair for absurd satires of targets like corporate culture and American excess, Judge is certainly owed at least one big success. Unfortunately, even with Miramax Films as his new distributor, Extract, Judge’s latest, doesn’t have the juice. This time it’s Judge who robs himself of success.
Extract is a dark comedy without any hints of light. A joyless factory owner named Joel (Jason Bateman) finds himself trapped between the incompetent employees at his titular extract factory and a marriage where sex is consistently blocked by his wife’s (Kristen Wiig) tattered sweatpants. Enter a beautiful con artist named Cindy (Mila Kunis) and an unfortunate accident that jeopardizes Joel’s factory and, without establishing any of its characters as anything but trapped sad sacks, it’s all downhill from there.
As a story about a banal loser being crushed by modern life, Extract shares some striking similarities to Office Space. But where Office Space never let the doldrums of corporate inanity stop Judge’s characters from doing something as absurd as curb-stomping a copier, Extract feels like a collection of humiliations without punchlines. Languidly paced, the film is essentially a parade of selfish or ignorant people making selfish or ignorant choices, none of which are heightened enough to be anything but pathetic. In Office Space, a corporate whipping boy burned his company to the ground while mumbling about a Swingline stapler. In Extract, a misunderstanding over a drug dealer’s girlfriend leads to a black eye.
Despite being led by the usually strong Bateman, the film’s main cast doesn’t do much to liven the comedy. Instead, while Joel is occasionally given a line so pathetic that it dives low enough to find a laugh, supporting roles like David Koechener as Joel’s gratingly ingratiating neighbour and J.K. Simmons as Joel’s profane right-hand man are the only characters who show shades of previous Judge successes. Without compelling main characters, the whole film feels leaden and joyless. It isn’t any fun to kick someone who started on the floor.
Judge certainly deserves a break. It’s just a shame this wasn’t it.
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