Review of Extract (2009) by Squalid J — 27 Apr 2010

Hmm. Extract is the new one from Mike Judge - he of King of the Hill/Beavis & Butthead/Office Space/Idiocracy fame - and it's such a curiously slight film that I find myself unsure whether I'm being too forgiving of it because of my goodwill towards him, or unfair towards it it because of my high expectations of him. It's about a small-town factory owner and his various problems, too numerous and tedious to list. There's a lot of different plot threads, most of which don't really go anywhere; if I'm honest, the whole film has a regrettably vague, meandering feel.

If you'll allow for some wild, completely uninformed conjecture, then I think what's happened here is that Mike Judge has tried to make Extract as down-to-earth as possible. There's not much in the way of the big events which propelled his previous films along - no accidental time travel, no gun-toting criminals, no threat of biological warfare...hell, even Office Space had a heart attack AND a fire. I suspect that Extract is an attempt to at recreating what Kevin Smith did with Clerks, in taking totally believable characters and capturing a brief snapshot of their lives. The difference is, Clerks had only one plot, and it was miniscule - a bloke goes into work on his day off and spends the whole day regretting it. Extract has several, and they all end in stalemate.

The humour in the film is closest to that of King of the Hill, in that many of the jokes are firmly character-orientated and the characters themselves feel like people you could conceivably meet tomorrow. As such, the nicest thing I can say about Extract is that it makes this style of humour work, despite only having an hour and a half in which to show you who these characters are. I suppose it doesn't count for much when our main character, Joel, is played by Jason Bateman, who's basically played the same character over and over since Arrested Development (no shame in that - it's certainly worked for Michael Cera), but it's just how easily we get to know the supporting cast that's really impressive. In particular, Ben Affleck plays a drug-addled bartender who gets most of the movie's best lines, Kristen Wiig (again) does a lot of good work with very little screen-time (again), and Clifton Collins Jr plays Step - a working man through-and-through, newly bereft of one of his testicles and arguably the most real person in the whole movie.

There's a lot of good stuff in Extract, but it won't take you anywhere, and there are moments - such as a threatened strike from the factory workers, a confrontation with an overly-diligent male prostitute and a fairly ill-timed moment of infidelity - which could have been hilarious but end up anti-climactic. It's an alright film, overall, but I expect much better than alright from Mike Judge.

It's funny how much this review has focused on the negative, given that in truth I quite enjoyed Extract, and I have a feeling I'll end up buying the DVD, eventually.