Mike Judge returns to the workplace with Extract, but unlike Office Space, he seems not only somewhat unfamiliar with his chosen
milieu – a suburban extract plant founded and owned by Joel (Jason Bateman) –
but uninterested in actually exploring its unique employer-employee dynamics.
Instead, the actual setting feels like something of an afterthought, which is
how one might describe much of Judge’s follow-up to Idiocracy, which manages to be pleasant without ever eliciting much
in the way of laughter. The nominal story is a tangled web involving Joel’s
efforts to sell his company despite a potential lawsuit from a testicle-injured
coworker (Clifton Collins Jr.), his concurrent, moronic plot – concocted with a
doofus druggie bartender (Ben Affleck) – to make his wife (Kristen Wiig) cheat
on him with a hired gigolo (Dustin Milligan), and his budding feelings for a
new hire (Mila Kunis) who, it turns out, is a grifter. Eschewing sociological
office satire, Judge instead goes for a broader, cartoony vision of human
stupidity, a more limited aim that, predictably, reaps more limited rewards.
Still, courtesy of Bateman’s ordinary-Joe buffoonery, Wiig’s pitch-perfect
soft-spoken awkwardness, and Affleck’s brain-fried idiocy, Extract is, if not riotous, at least agreeable, and in the person
of David Koechner’s intrusive neighbor, continues Judge’s portrait of nosy,
slow-talking, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer pests as the true source of everyday
evil.
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