Jason Bateman (right) and his assistant, played by J.K. Simmons, run a flavor extract factory and must deal with lawsuits, incompetent employees and Bateman's rocky marriage.
Mike Judge has made a career of creating characters who are perfect caricatures of the people who populate everyday life. In ‘‘Office Space” he created a whole cast of them, people who were cartoonish enough to be funny, real enough to become pop-culture staples. If you hear someone end a sentence with ‘‘that’d be greeeeat” or slowly say ‘‘I’m a Michael Bolton fan” you have that instant flash of recognition.
After all, Judge’s strength has always been about highlighting the most annoyingly idiotic tendencies of us all, mostly to comic effect. So when the trailers for ‘‘Extract” started dropping, and the scene had shifted from a white-collar office to a blue-collar factory, it looked like Judge was primed to make another blip on the pop culture radar.
Jason Bateman plays the manager of a factory that manufactured flavor extracts. Stuck in a rut with his wife (Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig), Bateman has his eyes out for a woman who is interested in flavor additives.
Bateman plays the same character that was so well received on television’s ‘‘Arrested Development,” a normal character trapped in a world of people too dumb to be real.
His factory is populated with the type of secondary characters that usually make such an impact, but most of them aren’t on screen nearly enough to get big laughs, and the two women with the most lines are too annoying to laugh at.
Bateman finds solace at the local bar, where Ben Affleck serves his cocktails and a sympathetic ear for his problems. After a horse tranquilizer or two enters the mix one night, Bateman sets in motion a chain of events that leaves him fighting to save his marriage.
Like ‘‘Office Space,” this movie deals with a man whose dissatisfaction about where his life is going takes a strange turn after an altered state. But in ‘‘Extract,” the trouble in Bateman’s marriage takes him away from his place of business, and also shoves many of the goofy characters into the background.
It’s too bad. J.K. Simmons plays Bateman’s second-in-command, and he has far too little screen time. He calls the men at the factory ‘‘dinkus” and the women ‘‘what’s-her-face” but aside from that funny exchange in the beginning, Simmons isn’t featured nearly enough.
The two secondary plots dance in and out of the film, but they aren’t developed enough to be anymore than afterthoughts. Mila Kunis plays a beautiful con artist, but after a great first scene she only pops in on random occasions and is pretty much irrelevant.
It’s a hard movie to classify. It’s funny, but it’s not going to be quoted by generations of teenagers in the years to come.
Unfortunately, and despite the title, ‘‘Extract” seems to be a diluted version of what Judge has made his career doing. The characters are funny, but not that funny. The laughs are there, but they’re not the same quality of laugh.
You’ll probably laugh throughout most of the film’s 90 minutes, but afterwards you’ll be hard pressed to remember the funniest scene, or a specific joke that made you laugh.
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