Extract
Dir: Mike Judge
Rating: 2.5/5.0
Miramax Films
91 Minutes
Mike Judge really hates stupid people. Sure, comedy as a whole is partially founded on the humor inherently tied to those of the population with minimal IQs, but between Judge's last feature Idiocracy and the new Extract, the director may as well have declared war on the stupid. Which is a little funny when you think about it, since Judge's career as a whole is more or less owed to the antics of two slackers who took being dumb to impossible new heights.
Unlike "Beavis and Butthead" or "King of the Hill," both of which carefully walk the line between finely honed observations of every day stupid behavior and ruthless evisceration of blue collar America at its worst, Extract unfortunately feels a little aimless. "King of the Hill" especially found Judge simultaneously mocking and paying tribute to a lifestyle much of America pretends to be as distanced from as possible, a lifestyle Judge himself knows intimately, having grown up in the backwaters of Texas. What's missing from Extract is that sense of tribute which made the humor feel less bitter and more knowing.
Perhaps some of this can be blamed on the failure of Judge's magnum opus, Idiocracy which was an admittedly flawed experiment that nonetheless succeeded at bringing a new type of adventurous style to Judge's formula. While Idiocracy featured the same type of everyman protagonist that Judge uses as the audience surrogate in all of his films, it also found the director working with a new environment motivated by a relevance usually left out of his projects. Extract, by contrast, is a step backwards, a merger of the world of Office Space and "King of the Hill."
Extract focuses on Brian (Jason Bateman), a relatively young entrepreneur who has founded his own company devoted to making flavor extracts. Brian isn't an intellectual, or even really a white collar American; he's a simple guy who did well with a simple idea and defines his success by the fact that he now drives a BMW. Brian is still the type of business owner who knows the names of all of his employees and his goal has simply been to make it to the point where a larger company will buy him out so he can retire. The only real conflict in Brian's life is that his wife Susie (Kristen Wiig) hasn't had sex with him in several months and his best friend Dean (Ben Affleck) thinks all of his problems can be solved with drugs. Of course, everything goes a little crazy when one of his employees loses a testicle in an accident at the factory and con artist/drifter Cindy (Mila Kunis) shows up to turn the incident into a debacle she can profit from.
The movie is entertaining, but its jokes are obvious and its characters barely there. Laughing at the scenes feels like an exercise in reflex, it requires no thought or deliberation. You're meant to sympathize with Brian, but the character just comes across as a clueless sad sack hellbent on shuffling the blame of all his problems on other people. Brian essentially winds up feeling like the more financially successful version of Peter from Office Space, which is to say he's just as mopey but nowhere near as interesting. The other characters then just become fluff to liven up Brian's adventures in ennui.
Fortunately, those other characters are played by the likes of J.K. Simmons and David Koechner. Koechner in particular, best known for bit roles in Anchorman and Thank You For Smoking is given more room than normal to expand his range. Where Koechner can sometimes be over utilized as a crazed, spastic man boy, here he is allowed to play with subtlety as one of Judge's trademark character types-- the clingy, socially awkward neighbor. That unfortunately doesn't hide the fact that most of the supporting cast in the film fill roles that could best be described as Judge-by-the-numbers.
Still, even Judge-by-numbers is ahead of the standard summer comedy. There's also the sad notion that although Extract is undeniably the worst effort from Judge so far, it seems poised to be his most successful, with its all-star cast and heavy media blitz. If that pays for a few more Idiocracy level experiments, then I suppose the sacrifice was worth it.
by Morgan Davis
