Joel Reynolds (Jason Bateman), the owner of Reynold’s (sic) Extract, is having a bad day. His wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), has cut him off sexually, and Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.), one his employees, has lost a testicle in a freak work-related accident. Step looks ready to accept an insurance company payoff, but a con artist named Cindy (Mila Kunis) gets wind of his plight and convinces him to sue Joel to hell and back, a move that threatens Joel’s possible buyout by General Mills. Oh, and Joel’s plan to have a brain-dead man-whore seduce his wife so he can have a guilt-free tryst with Cindy doesn’t exactly go as planned, either.

CRITIQUE

Despite all of the taglines and fawning notices the marketing folks and fame-hungry, blurb-happy critics were throwing out a few months back, Extract is not the second coming of Office Space. Mike Judge’s return to workplace filmmaking (after detouring with the barely released Idiocracy) has almost nothing in common with his 1998 cult favorite. Anyone who’s spent any time behind a desk can find something to relate to in that movie, but there’s nothing to latch on to in Extract.

That has nothing to do with the fact that this movie features a boss as its main character, but is due rather to the movie’s being populated by idiots; anyone who can relate to any of these characters on anything more than a surface level is probably too dumb to operate a television. Nor is this movie anywhere near as funny as Office Space (which, to use a cliché, gets funnier the more times you watch it); there are some good gags and a couple of very funny lines, but Extract is only fitfully funny, and I certainly can’t imagine any of its characters, situations, or dialogue becoming a part of the pop culture landscape.

Judge’s works have always featured a mixture of the mundane and the contrived, and Extract is no exception. The characters’ day-to-day lives have a ring of truth to them, but at the same time you get a series of situations that make Beavis and Butt-head’s classic run in with Sterculius look almost plausible. There’s a sitcom feeling to Judge’s plotting, and at times the movie feels like a bunch of unrelated ideas strung together.

Everything is blended together in a forced, unnatural manner (Kunis’s character comes across as more of a last-ditch effort to make the plot work than an organic component), and the finale is a lazy, extremely unsatisfying copout. In fact, the plotting is ultimately so pointless, and the characters so far removed from anything resembling actual human beings (or at least I hope they are), anyone watching the movie would be wise to simply ignore them and wait for the amusing bits.

Don’t worry about Step as a person, just enjoy the execution of the scene that leaves him with only one grape in his pouch. Don’t worry about how Cindy keeps getting away with her cons (Judge certainly doesn’t put much though into it), just be thankful she hires the funniest fictional shyster this side of Jackie Chiles. (Said shyster is played by Gene Simmons, whose dogged refusal to grow old gracefully has resulted in a physical appearance that makes the character that much funnier.) Don’t worry about all of that stuff involving Suzie and the brain-dead gigolo (played by Dustin Milligan, whose performance is so effortless it raises about a thousand questions), just remember that every time Joel goes home to check on her he’s going to have another hilarious encounter with his annoying neighbor (played to perfection by David Koechner).

And don’t bother trying to figure out why Ben Affleck has spent so many years trying to be a movie star when he should have realized he’s far more effective as a character actor/supporting player, just hope that his work here is a harbinger of things to come.

That was the long of it, so here’s the short: either Extract needs to be funnier or it needs to have a story that doesn’t somehow manage to be both thin and lumpy. Seeing as how it’s supposed to be a comedy, I’d pick the former, but that’s just me.

THE VIDEO

A Mike Judge movie means flat, boring, no-frills visuals, and that’s what you get here. The 1.85:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 50GB disc--is flat and only extreme close-ups exhibiting anything other than a middling level of detail. Fleshtones can be a little waxy, especially in medium shots. Colors are fairly well reproduced, although even the brighter hues don’t really stand out much. On the whole, it’s pretty much what I was expecting. 

THE AUDIO

The sound design in a Judge flick is usually just as flat as the visuals, and this disc’s DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track delivered pretty much what I was expecting. There’s some directionality in some of the scenes set on the factory floor, and the music has a decent stereo spread, but for the most part the audio remains locked in the center channel. Dialogue fidelity is a little on the uneven side, sounding okay most of the time but somewhat lifeless at certain points.

A French Dolby Digital 5.1 track is also included; English SDH, French, and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Mike Judge’s Secret Recipe (11 minutes) is an oddball making-of featurette that focuses on the advantages and challenges of shooting in a working plant, the cast, and the filming of Judge’s cameo.

Exclusive to this Blu-ray release are one deleted scene and five extended scenes (5 minutes), all of which feature more banter from Bateman and Affleck.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s a close call as to whether or not it’s worth it, but in the end I’d say Extract makes for a good rental candidate. There’s a chance you’ll get a few laughs, but you’ll forget the movie half an hour after it’s over.