Extract is a misstep from the usually bankable Mike Judge. We're talking about a total loss, but the movie is filled with so many stupid characters that it doesn’t hit home the way Office Space did - a film it can easily be compared to.
Joel (Jason Bateman) owns a successful extract company and is planning on selling the business and retiring. Unfortunately, little things in his life are eating away at his happiness. First, his unavoidable, nosy, and kind-of-aggressive-but-only-because-he’s-too-dumb-to-know-any-better neighbor Nathan (David Koechner). Next is his wife, whom he loves but is never in the mood for sex, Suzie (Kristen Wiig). Add these to a freak work accident that's left one of his employees with only one testicle - he'll probably sue - and Cindy (Mila Kunis) a sexy con artist who threatens everything and Joel is barely holding it together.
Stupid characters can make for great comedy but Extract goes about it the wrong way. Joel is attracted to Cindy (Can you blame him? I've seen Black Swan). Of course, being married, he doesn't want to cheat on his wife so, through an extreme contrivance, he decides to hire a too-dumb-to-live gigolo (Dustin Milligan) to seduce her. Once Cindy cheats on him, he won’t feel bad about cheating in return. It's preposterous. The workers at the extract plant, the gigolo, the lawyers hired by the injured workers, Joel's drug-obsessed best friend (Ben Affleck). Everyone is just so dumb it feels like the film's set in another dimension. If at least the protagonist was normal and bewildered by everything happening around him, but that isn’t the case. Joel isn’t a victim of circumstances, every time he falls down, it's his fault; he fails to communicate with people, doesn’t act like a normal human and makes endless bad decisions.
Before discussing the positive aspects, I want to discuss Cindy, Mila Kunis’ character. She’s kind of fun. She'll use anything to get the best out of everyone else, be it sex appeal, feigning emotion or her sweet-natured appearance. She also doesn’t belong. Con artists can be heroes or villains depending on their surroundings. If the people being duped are crooked, selfish or otherwise unpleasant, you're happy to see them swindled. Here, I don’t know what role she's supposed to serve. She’s like an adult walking around tricking children out of their rare Pokemon cards: darkly funny at first, but the longer it goes on, the more your interest wanes. Her role doesn’t add up to much in the end.
There are loads of talented actors in Extract and they do well with the material they’re given. It’s the story that lets them down. I didn’t laugh often, but when I did, it was hard. The subplots are enjoyable, with the dumb gigolo serving as a prime example of an idea whose execution is successful despite everything. There are some good one-liners, particularly between J.K. Simmons and Jason Bateman or between David Koechner, Christen Wiig, and Jason Bateman.
Extract is nowhere near the winner it could have been, but if you’re a Mike Judge fan it’s worth a rental. You can mentally pick out the best bits and store them in your memory, right next to your favorite gags from King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-Head and Idiocracy. (On DVD, July 12, 2014)