Mike Judge’s new film Extract, is a comedy made in the same model as office space. Transplanting some of the focus off of the protagonists job, but still maintaining the same style of small annoyance humor. Starring Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, J.K. Simmons and Ben Afleck.
I thought this movie was good, but I didn’t like it as much as Office Space, or Idiocracy. Not that it wasn’t funny, it just didn’t pull me in the same way. I hear a lot of people say that they love Jason Bateman, but I just don’t understand why, I don’t mind him, but he doesn’t stand out to me in any way. He is so plain, almost to the point of being boring, but he certainly didn’t ruin the film.
In some ways this film goes further with some of the jokes, and it was funny, but the deviations subtract from the overall plot and make it feel a little sluggish. Even though it’s only a brisk 89 minutes long. This might sound a little harsh because it’s just a comedy, and it succeeded in being funny throughout the whole film, but this is the main reason it wasn’t as good as office space. In fact the main plot was so thin that Mila Kunis was barely in it. They were so focused on small secondary plots that the main story hardly existed.
This is admittedly knit-picky, I laughed throughout it, and it’s better than a lot of comedies that come out. I would even go so far as to say this is definitely worth watching once. I thought the sub-plot with Jason Bateman’s wife cheating on him with the gigolo pool-boy was really funny.
As far as the Blu-ray goes, it’s a pretty bare-bones disk. (Less than 20 minutes of special features.) Although I’ve started to move my collection completely towards Blu-ray as of late. As sad as it might sound, I’ve even started to enjoy watching comedy’s in high def. The prices really aren’t that much worse, and the technology is just going to keep getting cheaper.
Overall I would give this movie 6 out of 10 gold stars.
