FILM REVIEW: EXTRACT

Jason Bateman And Mila Kunis Battle Bravely To 'Extract' Some Fun, But Lose In The End

September 4, 2009

Let’s all take a moment and appreciate Jason Bateman. He’s one child star that didn’t go all Todd Bridges on us. Instead, he kept fighting, hooked onto a hugely influential sitcom (Arrested Development), and now has carved out a burgeoning movie career in Juno, etcetera, as a dependable wisecracker.

Raised in the Hollywood spotlight, it would be strange that any former child star would turn out with such a gift for onscreen Everymanhood…but it’s hard to argue the evidence. Without Bateman’s vulnerable sarcasm, Mike Judge’s amiable but soggy Extract would be considerably less. With the wrong lead actor, it could’ve been a cartoonish disaster (but it isn’t).

Bateman’s priceless reactions are refreshment to a film that gives the boss plenty to suffer: Joel is the owner of a cooking extract manufacturing factory ready to sell big to Big Food. The week that should be his lifelong vindication instead becomes exasperation, as his life goes bonkers with professional and domestic mayhem. Causing havoc are his celibate wife (Kristen Wiig), his druggie pal (Ben Affleck), a klepto gamine (Mila Kunis), a pool boy gigolo (Dustin Milligan), and a floor supervisor (Clifton Collins, Jr.), who accidentally participates in a different sort of extract…involving nuts.

Judge fills out the roster with the “quirky” characters that come and go from the factory and around the neighborhood. Mainly, they seem like the people whose audition tapes were rejected from other Mike Judge projects — some blue-hair leftovers from King of the Hill, the fabled third member of Beavis and Butthead, etc. Say this for Judge — like Preston Sturges, he can write funny lines for just about anybody in their own personal vernacular, but spinning them into more than comic dartboards isn’t his strongest talent.

For a film with such a cynical view of its characters (the right choice is always the last choice), it completely wimps out and goes sweet at the end. It looks like Joel, freed of his dead marriage, might ditch regular life and hit the road with Milan Kunis’ slutty thief on a multi-state criminal spree. Frankly, the film would be better if they were gunned down. That would have been an ending. That would have been a film that made the best of its strengths and left a real impression.

Alas, the ending of Extract does its civic duty and panders to bourgeois sensibility. Joel goes back to the factory and starts lining up an inexplicable and undeserved soft landing. As the film carries out a line of increasingly disappointing forgivenesses, you wonder why Judge ditched his pointed farce. That script was being sold by some great performances and heading to something great. As it is, there is still much to be enjoyed in this lesser work by a great writer, especially in Ms. Kunis' star-to-be onscreen sizzle and her flawed temptations. But ultimately, there is something extracted from the film's ending: fun.

'Extract' is in theaters now from Miramax Films.