Extract
Directed by Mike Judge
Two Stars
Mike Judge, who is most famous for his successful animated television series “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” has since graduated to a handful of live action motion pictures in which real people assume the roles of the cartoons.
His previous films, “Office Space” (1999), which has become a modern cultural staple, and “Idiocracy” (2006), which saw only a limited theatrical release, were both critical successes. However, perhaps because of the subject matter of those two films, the monotony of business suit labor and a world populated only by morons, Judge’s latest film, “Extract,” seems a little stale.
Jason Bateman stars as Joel, the owner of Reynold’s Extracts, a factory that produces only concentrated food flavorings. He looks down from his office loft windows on a factory floor populated only by morons, including an aging woman behind the conveyor belt controls who blames all the factory’s problem’s on its Mexican employees, a forklift driver (T.J. Miller) who plays in a slew of thrash metal bands that all include the same members, and a sorter nicknamed Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) who takes his sorting responsibilities quite seriously.
The factory has grown rapidly and made a wealthy man out of Joel, who, with the aid of his assistant Brian (J.K. Simmons), is in the process of working out a deal to sell Reynold’s Extracts to General Mills. The negotiations are hampered, however, when an incident of negligence on the factory floor leaves Step a bit less well-off.
Meanwhile, Joel suffers from a stagnant sex life with his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig), who activates a force field when she ties her sweatpants for the evening, and a relentless neighbor (David Koechner) who insists on dragging Joel and Suzie to every social function he attends. Joel confides in his long time friend Dean (Ben Affleck) about his sexual frustrations, and Dean in turn convinces Joel to hire a gigolo to seduce Suzie so that he might have an affair without being hampered by conscience.
Finally, a beautiful grifter named Cindy (Mila Kunis) weaves in and out of the picture with motives that are never quite clear. We think she plans to seduce Step into suing the factory over his accident and then marry into his fortune, but this doesn’t explain why she would simultaneously get a job at the factory. Is she looking to con Joel twice?
“Extract” is not as busy as I’ve made it seem. It moves in and out of its several conflicts fairly seamlessly, and does a nice job of tying them all together. But the film is intermittently funny at best.
Bateman does a nice job as the overwhelmed factory owner whose world sucker punches him from every angle and all at the same time, but he’s working out from beneath a flat script that feels a bit too much like “Office Space” rehash and can’t seem to find solid footing for its comedic tone.
As I’ve said, all of these characters are cartoons, and I grew more and more aware of the responsibility of live action movies to depict human intelligence more realistically than animated movies. When Beavis and Butthead behave inhumanly stupid, it is inherently funny because they are not humans. They are merely cartoons: reflections of humans. But if a real human behaves inhumanly stupid? That’s just, well, cartoonish.
September 9, 2009
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