Extract

From featureless office parks to sad chain restaurants to sterile residential developments, Mike Judge captures the soul-raping banality of the American exurbs like no other. These factory-issue surroundings, with their grinding mediocrity, have a deeply enervating effect on his characters. It's like all that fluorescent light and fake wood paneling are sucking the their life-force out of them right there on camera. This makes Judge's movies pointed critiques of life in the suffocating embrace of runaway sprawl of ugly McMansions and compulsive consumption of useless gizmos and gray-tasting meat. This also means that the characters in Mike Judge movies are so anaesthetised and demoralized by their environment that they can barely be moved to speak complete sentences, let alone express vivid emotions. Judge's zombified protagonists, coupled with his indifferent attitude towards plotting, runs the risks of making his work feel as flat and listless as one of his cubicle-jockies. Office Space, Judge's first directorial effort and a certified cult classic, avoids this pitfall thanks to a set-up painfully familiar to office workers nationwide, and a bevy of colorful supporting characters bristling with quotable dialogue. Judge's new film, Extract, lacks both of those attributes, and as a result, it feels as lifeless as a TGI Friday's waitress at the end of a particularly birthday-intensive shift.

The story, such as it is, concerns the sexual and financial travails of Joel (Jason Bateman), the owner of a food extract company.. Ah, who can't relate the the difficulties inherent in running a chemical plant and commuting to a mini-mansion? Bateman moves from one scenario to another, involving his stoned buddy Ben Affleck, who's actually pretty funny, a comely young con artist (Mila Kunis), and a grievously injured factory hand (Clifton Collins, Jr.). None of the plot strands boast much in the way of plausibility or narrative momentum. Things just sort of happen, and then other things sort of happen, and at the end of the movie, not much interesting, or particularly amusing, has happened, except for one great, surprising turn near the end. It's a fairly accurate depiction of the ennui and mundanity of life in the commuter-zone where people have to get in their SUV's to get a pizza, but that accuracy comes with the price of robbing the characters and plot of zest. It's sort of like a TGI Friday's appetizer platter on film.