A Failure of Talent

EXTRACT

Put the director of Office Space at the helm of a comedy starring Arrested Development’s Jason Bateman, SNL’s Kristin Wiig, Juno’s J.K. Simmons, and Ben Affleck, it’s bound to be a howler, right? Wrong.

Mike Judge, famed writer-director of cult classic Office Space is back to movies with Extract, another workplace comedy. This time, the office is a flavoured extract factory owned and ran by Joel Reynold, Bateman’s character. The film has two storylines: high on horse tranquilizer, Joel hires a gigolo to have sex with his wife (Wiig) so that he will not feel guilty having an affair with the factory temp. In the second, the temp, Cindy (Mila Kunis of That ’70 Show), takes advantage of the victim of a workplace accident in order to bank on his potential lawsuit earnings. Sounds simple, and it is.

Bateman’s character is the sort he always seems to play – the everyman. There is nothing interesting about this character type Bateman has pigeonholed himself into. Joel Reynold is essentially Michael Bluth (Arrested Development) as was Michael Bluth essentially Mark Loring (Juno). This is the same kind of trap friend and occasional co-star Michael Cera has fallen into as well – if he can’t find a fresh role soon, he might just dry up.

One of the biggest problems with the story is with Wiig’s character. In a dreamlike sequence, Joel’s hired gigolo poses as the new pool boy and seduces Suzie. The scene seems a success not just because Wiig and Dustin Milligan are genuinely funny for a brief moment, but because it happens in Joel’s head. When it is revealed that the gigolo stunt was successful (more than once) the movie sinks to a deeper level of failure and the scene loses its spunk. Some kind of twist is expected in the storyline, but what you see is what you get. Unpredictability in movies is always welcome, but when it becomes unbelievable the movie fails.

The other storyline involving Kunis’ con woman character is so dry and unmemorable it deserves no more mention than this.

There are brief moments throughout the film where the all-star comic cast manages successful sketches, but the jokes are often one-note and overlong like the “annoying neighbour” bits with Anchorman’s David Koechner.

While its credentials sound like the ingredients for another comic gem, the movie won’t extract much laughter from audiences. To say that it is a disappointment is not enough – Extract is a failure of talent.

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uwogazette.ca