Review: Extract

Mike Judge produed two of the greatest work of the 1990s, first the animated scomedy King of The Hill and later the great cult hit Office Space. Since then his work has been anything but consistent with his last film, Idiocracy, being patchy at best. Now he returns with Extract, a film about a man who runs a small factory making different flavoured-extracts hence the title. Jason Bateman plays Joel a man whose factory is just about keeping its head above water, whose marriage has become passionless and whose next door neighbour is driving him crazy. His best friend and bartender, Dean suggests that Joel hire a rent-boy to try and seduce his wife so then Joel can romance new factory worker Cindy, not knowing that Cindy is a con-artist who is trying to take money from the business. An incident on the factory floor complicates matters further and places the Extract Factory's future in jeapordy.

It seems that Judge always tries something new with each of his projects. Office Space concentrated on the mudanity of working while Idiocracy looked at our reliance on technology and how advertising has taken over our lives. Extract's focus is on how married life can change a relationship and the horrors of a suburban life and it pulls this off quite well. However Judge feels the need to pepper his clever obvservaional humour, with a whole lot of genital jokes and gross-out humour which doesn't quite gel. Jason Bateman is great in the lead, trying to control a bunch of eccentric characters, similarly to what he did in Arrested Development. Kristen Wiig is very good as Bateman's wife and JK Simmons is also as reliable as ever as the factory foreman. Mila Kunis is incredibly sexy and quite a good actress and shows new layers to her personality by playing the incredibly manuplitive Cindy and Ben Affleck also looks like he's enjoying himself as Dean. But Judge always creates one or two characters who stay in the memory in Office Space it was probably Gary Cole's annoying boss Bill Lumberg, here it is David Koechner's annoying neighbour Nathan a man incredibly dull who can't take a hint and is therefore hilarious in the process.

Overall a comedy that isn't always laugh-out-loud but is always fairly competent and has good all-round performances. Extract is certainly a lot better than Idiocracy but doesn't hit the heddy heights of Judge's earlier work.