When I first saw Office Space, I can't say that I was horribly impressed, but there was certainly a lot of quotable fun in the watching. After further viewings, I'm not sure the film quite deserves it's cult status, but some moments do. Extract is a film clearly from the same mind, and with much the same perspective on humor. Whether or not it manages to hold the same level of interest is difficult to predict, largely because it would have been so difficult to predict it the first time around.
Extract is the story of Joel (Jason Bateman), mild-mannered owner of a company that produces extracts and flavorings. He built himself up from nothing, but life isn't all that fun anymore. His home life is not particularly interesting in the sense that he and his wife have become something better described as roommates. His employees are a motley assortment that he babysits. His best friend Dean (Ben Affleck) still tends bar where he and Joel used to work together, and his offerings of such advice and assorted pills is getting old.
The luster has worn off being your own boss, and there's something about never having sex that makes everything about your day an order of magnitude more irritating. Even without insanely boring neighbors that won't go away, and employees that hold up the line for spite, life is not working out the way Joel had planned.
When hustler Cindy insinuates herself into Joel's life in order to cash in on factory worker Step's (Clifton Collins Jr.) extremely unfortunate accident, Joel falls victim to Dean's scheming. Hiring the world's dumbest gigolo, Joel hopes he can get his wife to have an affair, thus opening the door for his having one with Cindy. However, that was just a drunken, drugged bit of a laugh, and when morning light reveals that the plan has actually been set in motion, Joel is left scrambling.
The resulting zany adventure is tricky to endorse. It has moments, in much the way Office Space does, though I'm not sure the overall effort gels. If you love the one, you're fairly likely to have a good time, but I don't know that this one provides any traction for serious momentum. It is certainly clever in its way, but how well that cleverness is molded into comedy is somewhat questionable.
The Blu-Ray release offers the added bonus of five extended scenes and one deleted scene over and above the featurette Mike Judge's Secret Recipe, which is available in both format releases. The featurette is pretty interesting, and covers a wide variety of what needs to be taken into account when putting a film together, and even the curious aspects you need to take into account to try to deliver the comedy of an idea.
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About Marc Eastman
Marc Eastman is the owner and operator of Are You Screening? and has been writing film reviews for over a decade, and several branches of the internet's film review world have seen his name. His reviews have brought him personal praise from the director of a major motion picture, and have been used as required reading in a course at a major University. These priceless rewards, along with just bags of cash, keep him from straying from freelance writing. He is also a member of The Broadcast Film Critics Association and The Broadcast Television Journalists Association.
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