I'm a pretty big fan of Mike Judge. Being at least partially from Texas, I always thought King of the Hill was a funny and poignant take on a 'typical' Texan family. In addition to being hilarious, Office Space spoke to my generation's distrust of 'adult life' like few films have before or since. I even thought Idiocracy was vastly underated and unwatched as a thought provoking social commentary, even if it was greatly flawed. Because of all this I was eagerly looking forward to his 2009 release Extract.
After watching it this week (I don't find it cost effective to see comedies in the theater) boy was I disappointed. This movie ranks up there for me in terms of cinematic disappointment maybe almost on the level of The Phantom Menace (OK that might be a GIGANTIC stretch, even if I didn't think it was 'that bad' the first time I saw it). How could the creator of Office Space and Beavis and Butthead make something so.... bland?
In a short plot summary, Extract tells the story of a small business owner, played by Jason Bateman, and his struggle with being a part of the rat race. Really the problems start here. Does Jason Bateman ever play anything other than the likable audience surrogate? He's boring, never really funny, and his exasperated face gets old, quick. You also have That 70's Show's Mila Kunis arriving to spice things up as a grifter/con artist. There is also a subplot where Bateman hires a male prostitute to sleep with his wife (Kristen Wiig) so that he can hook up with Kunis without feeling guilty. Oh yeah, and a bearded and almost unrecognizable Ben Affleck plays Bateman's best friend.
That's a lot of big names to mess up. You get the slightly more hip crowd with Bateman and his Arrested Development stint, and Wiig is often pretty decent on SNL. Ben Affleck and Mila Kunis are pretty big in their own right and were probably used to draw in a bigger audience. Extract wasn't a complete failure (Wikipedia tells me it made $10.8M on an $8M budget) but I don't know anyone who saw it. It also scored decently well with the critics (a score of 61 on Metacritic and 63% on Rotten Tomatoes), even getting a B from my AV Club folks. All this points to a 'decent but underwhelming comedy', however if I had to 'grade' it, I would give it more something in the C- range.
First things first, it's just not very funny. There were a few guffaws here and there while I was watching it, but not anything close to what I think a 'comedy' requires. If your movie has less laughs in it than the average episode of The West Wing, you know there's a problem. No one watches comedies for the plot, especially if the plot of your movie is slow and meandering.
Back to that plot. The story starts when a worker in Bateman's factory suffers a major crotchal injury on the job. Kunis sees this in the newspaper, and starts to date the injured party in order to get him to sue the company for more money. She also gets a job at the extract company for unknown reasons. Bateman's personal life starts to go downhill when the prostitute he hired continues to screw his wife long after Bateman tries to 'fire' him. Additionally his injured employee hires a lawyer (Gene Simmons?) and might take the entire company out with the lawsuit. Everything seems to go downhill for Bateman, until miraculously everything gets fixed. He even meets up with Kunis for a night of romance, and she doesn't steal his wallet!
This last bit is the most confounding part of the movie. We don't spend NEARLY enough time with Kunis to figure out her character. She seems just like a self serving conwoman, and until Bateman gives her a verbal lashing she's completely one dimensional. However after he insults her and her parasitic way of life, she breaks down and cries. She doesn't really say anything, they have sex and then she leaves. Did she learn anything? Was she playing them all along? What the hell happened? Would she really turn down pursuing a multi-million dollar lawsuit just because the nice guy tried to make her feel guilty?
However my biggest problem with the movie is that it just felt like a cheap transparent ripoff of Office Space. I understand why he would want to recapture the magic from his cult success, but it doesn't work if the new movie has nothing to stand on by itself. There are the same comments about work being a drag, and feeling that your life is a waste, but even Judge doesn't seem to be committed to the message this time through. And unlike achieving some sort of cathartic change like we get in Office Space, here everything goes back to the status quo.
Extract is not worth seeing. I hope Mike Judge hasn't lost it, but perhaps after the monetary debacle of Idiocracy (the film industry refused to advertise for the movie, or even put it in many theaters based on it's strong anti-corporate message) he has decided to make middling movies that get made and make money without being the least bit interesting.
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