Every once in awhile a comedy comes along that makes you sit up and take notice, you usually will find yourself laughing out loud, maybe even crying from all the laughing that you experience. Mike Judge is responsible for making us laugh, his King Of The Hill is corny and a little bit old fashioned but we still laugh, his Beavis and Butthead, well lets just leave it at we still laugh. Now Mike Judge brings us the story of a small business owner trying to pave his way in the American workplace, "Extract" is what comedy should be, simple.
Joel Reynold (Jason Bateman) seems to have everything. A small business he has brought from the ground up to be one of the bigger companies in the community, a nice home and he believes he is happily married, if he makes it home before eight PM that is. At eight PM his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) puts on her sweatpants and becomes as interested in him as he is in her designs of supermarket coupons. Sexually frustrated, Joel confides in his best pal, Dean (Ben Affleck), a barkeep who has his head in the clouds, usually it's a cloud of marijuana smoke. Joel soon finds himself wrapped up in a convoluted scheme to make Suzie cheat on him first, this is the extent of deans master plan that would allow Joel to pursue a beautiful new employee at his plant, Cindy (Mila Kunis) with a clear conscience. Dean gets Brad (Dustin Milligan) a dim-witted gigolo to pretend to be a pool boy and hit on Suzie.
The plan works so well that it becomes a daily exercise in futility for Joel, Cindy has gotten a job in the plant to try to convince Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) to sue the plant after he loses a vital body part in a freak accident. When Joel finds her in a motel room, he also happens to find several missing items that went missing at the extract plant. Chaos ensues of course, Step decides he wants to sue the plant after all and hires a lawyer, Joe Adler (Gene Simmons) is the kind of sleazy lawyer that everyone thinks is working hard for them but is only working for themselves. This movie is a comedy of errors and when Joel finally gets a shot at redemption he takes it, he deals with the gigolo issue and also the issue of Cindy and the missing items. He talks to Step and they both decide that suing the company isn't what he wants, Joel also decides not to sell the company he has worked so hard for.
I give Extract a 3 and on my avoidance scale a 0. The laughs come fast and hard in this movie, the jokes are more for the older teen and adult, they are both dirty and raunchy but here they work. Mike Judge has given comedy a much needed shot in the arm. Extract isn't the next great comedy, but it will make you laugh, it has many little inside jokes that you will laugh at, many of the jokes come across dead pan and they will make you laugh out loud. Extract is the type of movie we need right now, when the comedy film has landed in the gutter and refuses to leave, Extract pushed that idea around and we get to enjoy the ride.
Extract is rated R for Language, Sexual References and some Drug Use
Running time is 1 hr. 30 mins.
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