Joel is just an average guy, a quiet yet well-to-do American living in a small town who happens to own a flavor-extract company. He’d like to sell the plant, retire early and get back to a healthier sex life with his bored, put-upon wife.
But just as he seems prepared to make a deal with food giant General Mills to sell the plant for good, a freak accident occurs inside his plant that lops off one of a long-time employee’s testicles. The other is hanging by a thread, a metaphor that is apt for Joel’s life as it suddenly spirals out of control via a surreal round-robin of relationships that come unhinged and turn his life upside-down in the new comedy film “Extract.”
Written and directed by Mike Judge, who has chronicled the modern everyman’s life in the long-running and brilliant Fox cartoon “King of the Hill” as well as in the short-running yet brilliant 1999 film “Office Space,” “Extract” takes a sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued look at middle-class values in Middle America. But once again, Judge proves that he possesses a true love for the common, working-class Joe that translates into comedy that uplifts rather than demeans the lives of its characters.
And what characters they are, with Jason Bateman and Kristin Wiig as the lead couple; the gorgeous Mila Kunis playing Cindy, a con-artist whose ever-shifting false love interests enable her to sleep her way to the top of the bottom of the American ladder of success; Ben Affleck, in a hilarious turn as a mullet-sporting bartender named Dean, who can find a way to make any of his incredibly sleazy schemes sound perfectly moral; and Clifton Collins, Jr. as Step, the slow-witted warehouse worker whose twisted testicular travails drive the plot forward. Add in Dustin Milligan in a star-making performance as an incredibly dense aspiring gigolo named Brad, and you’ve got a cast of fresh faces and actors reinventing their personas, with the resulting effect being that Judge’s best lines aren’t just quotable, but rooted in a strong sense of realism turned askew.
“Extract” marks a welcome return to form for Judge, who spent the decade following “Office Space” immersed in television work and writing-directing the ambitious but highly uneven film satire “Idiocracy” in 2006. After seeing that passion project – in which an average American soldier wakes up 500 years in the future after an experiment goes awry and discovers he’s now the smartest man in the country – trapped on the Fox studio shelf for more than two years before getting literally dumped into a handful of theaters with no ad campaign to support it, Judge has clearly decided to return to the working-class characters that have made him a zillionaire already.
This time, though, Judge has improved his storytelling from the often-sketchy plotting of “Office Space,” making every scene an essential piece in an ever-more-complicated puzzle of riotous shenanigans. The overall effect matches the powerhouse effect of my favorite comedy of 2008, the Coen Brothers’ “Burn After Reading,” due to its whiplash pacing, utterly amoral and unpredictable characters and twisted dialogue.
Usually a film’s release on Labor Day weekend suggests that it’s a forgettable failure, with a merciful death assured amid the fading glow of summer box-office expectations. Thankfully, that isn’t the case with “Extract,” which deserves a long life in the theaters before its inevitable union with Judge’s other works as comedy staples to be quoted by generations to come.
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