EXTRACT
Written & Directed by Mike Judge
Produced by Michael Rotenberg & John Altschuler
Released by Miramax Films
USA. 90 min. Rated R 
With Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Kristen Wiig, J. K. Simmons, David Koechner, Clifton Collins, Jr., Gene Simmons, Beth Grant, Dustin Milligan & Ben Affleck 
 

Mike Judge might be best known as the guy who created Beavis & Butt-Head, but his Idiocracy was one of the few genuinely subversive movies to come out in the last few years—subversive, in the real sense, in that it upended some of the holiest liberal pieties. Set in a future dystopia where morons rule the world because smart, yuppie-types are too busy frittering away their discretionary incomes to breed, Idiocracy´s startling take-home message is, in the words of one Slate writer, “Outbreed the people you hate.” Yikes. 

Perhaps scared by the message, Idiocracy’s studio, 20^th Century Fox, killed it, shuffling it out of theaters after only a week (they didn’t even release a trailer), and letting it languish on DVD where it has picked up a small cult following. 

So now with Extract, Judge hopes for kinder results by returning to the low-key, workplace comedy of his 1999 cult classic Office Space (also a box-office flop, DVD hit). It’s amusing, smartly written, and well-acted, but without the ambition of Idiocracy or the built-in relevance of Office Space (after all, how many Americans still work in a factory?).

Likable Jason Bateman plays a character named Joel, but really he’s resuming his role as Michael Bluth from TV’s Arrested Development: an adult in a world of children, whose careful schemes and hard work are always upset by a confederacy of cretins. Here, Bateman is an uptight factory owner who plans to retire after selling his company, which makes an artificial flavoring he invented, to General Mills. But Joel’s plans go awry after one of the Idiocracy-like ignoramuses on his factory floor gets injured in the sort of workplace accident teenage boys find funny—it involves the man’s groin.

Joel’s marriage to a coupon designer (Kristen Wiig) is also in trouble, so he lets his friend, Dean (Ben Affleck), talk him into hiring a hapless gigolo to test his wife’s fidelity. And at work, he finds himself falling for a fetching new assembly worker (Mila Kunis), who, unbeknownst to Bateman, is working with a local shyster (Gene Simmons, briefly seen) to get the injured employee to sue his company into the ground.

Most of the fun of Extract comes from the smaller roles. Ben Affleck almost steals the show as a sometimes coherent, long-haired, New Agey bartender, who at one moment admits, “OK, so I’m a bit of a character.” The always reliable J. K. Simmons also does well as a prickly manager, radiating matter-of-fact contempt for the workers whose names he never bothers to learn. But another brief character, a socially obtuse neighbor obsessed with a Rotary Club dinner (played by David Koechner), eats up too many scenes, and seems like a conscious imitation of the stapler-obsessed Milton from Office Space, one insisted on by a studio executive eager for the necessary “quirk” quotient.

And although Extract hums along pleasantly enough and is often quite funny, many of the jokes lack inspiration. This movie treats us not to one but two scenes where a stuffed shirt gets stoned then freaks out, a device that was last funny when Hot Shots! came to theaters. Still, Extract’s somewhat grouchy, pro-management, outlook—all the factory workers are lazy doofuses convinced the factory succeeds because, not in spite, of their efforts—has its contrarian pleasures. And for fans of Arrested Development, you can just ignore the title and pretend this is the feature film you’ve been waiting for (it’s probably all you’ll get). Brendon Nafziger
August 24, 2009