Extract can’t bottle the funny

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Extract isn’t a bad film. Really. I guess the apt term would be inconsequential. If the resounding message of Mike Judge’s best film, Office Space, was to do whatever it takes to wrangle out of your own personal soul-crushing corporate hell, then the moral of Extract is much less clear. That is, if it exists at all. Extract is one of those films that gives me the feeling it only exists to make us laugh. Not an ignoble pursuit, mind you, but that’s always been a creepy feeling for me. It’s why I never watched Scrubs, and can only stand 30 Rock in small doses.

After so expertly and intensely satirizing 9-to-5 with Office Space and, with the little-seen Idiocracy, the blunting of the American mind via popular culture and modern, self-centered apathy, Extract is simply disappointing. The name may refer to the essence of something, but this film is too shallow for the title to offer subtext. And that’s a real shame because the talent gathered here is top notch.

Jason Bateman stars as the young owner of an extracting plant that sells small bottles of various flavors for baking: vanilla, cherry, etc. He looks down from his modest office onto his crew manning the conveyor belt, a motley mix of workers from a snarky, 60-year-old lady to a heavy metal dimwit and a few Mexican immigrants. Bateman wants to sell the plant to a major food manufacturer so he can retire early and spend more time with his wife, the pretty-but-distant Kristin Wiig. Bateman is caught in a sexless marriage, which is the main talking point during his regular visits to a depressing chain hotel bar where Ben Affleck’s wily, Kramer-lite stoner tends bar and serves as Bateman’s best friend, and if his advice is ever heeded, his worst enemy.

When Mila Kunis’ gorgeous young temp comes to work at the plant, her flirtations only amplify Bateman’s marital woes, and he begins making decisions that unravel his personal and professional lives just as they should all be coming together. It’s not a bad premise for a film, but from here Judge insists on taking his narrative to truly ridiculous heights. It’s one thing to have unbelievable events take place in a movie, because if they’re things the audience wants to see happen, then we let it slide. But here, Extract seems to be forcing things on us we don’t want to see happen and expecting us to laugh at them.

For one, Wiig is underused, and much too low-key. Her manic Saturday Night Live energy dialed down to tiny pulses of life. Overall, much of Judge’s new comedy leans toward the nihilistic, “nothing good or meaningful ever happens in the world” comedy the Coen Brothers took a critical beating for with Burn After Reading. Though Extract didn’t grate on me like Burn did—mostly because of the surprising chemistry between Bateman and Affleck lifts the film along with the brilliant supporting role of David Koechner’s overly-talkative golly-jeepers neighbor—it contained some of the same airless feel. A few scenes were hilarious, and Judge still knows how to satirize and lament modern society—sometimes with just a couple of empty Pepsi bottles—but in the end nothing adds up. Judge nails Koechner’s nosy neighbor so well, he ought to focus his sarcastic eye on middle upper class suburban life and call his next film Gated.

Maybe the predominant problem with Extract is one of perspective. Beleaguered though he may be, Bateman is still the boss; a boss with a beautiful wife, a nice car and a huge house. And in a recession, who wants to sympathize with the boss? Office Space would not be the classic it is today had we been asked to root for Bill Lumbergh.