Review: Extract (2009)

[Tim Skirvin]

  Mike Judge has a talent for finding a premise and running with it.
Sometimes that premise turns out to be brilliant - positing a future where
stupidity reigns supreme, or examining the mind of that creepy office guy
in the background.  More often, the premise is fairly dull - two idiots
sitting around a television commenting on music videos, or just observing
the regular office politics of a small technology firm.  What's interesting
about his work is that the quality of the premise does not predict the
quality of the finished product.  Once the running starts, Judge is not
willing to nudge the story off of its path in order to find additional
humor.  It's an interesting method; when it it works well, but when it
doesn't work, the result can be boring and arduous.

  _Extract_, sadly, turned out to be in the latter category.

  Perhaps the problem is the premise itself.  There are three main
points:

  1.  Joel runs a successful but quirky small factory business with a
number of idiot employees.

  2.  Cindy is a hot con artist looking for a big score.

  3.  Dean, Joel's best friend, thinks that drugs are the solution to
all problems.

  There are plenty of sub-points; but those are the main three.  But
what's interesting is that they really are *separate* points.  Compare this
to the single sentence fragments that I used to describe Judge's earlier
work.  There just plain isn't a "high concept" here, upon which the rest of
the points could be hung; everything was truly separate.  And that made the
movie just too complicated - not in a "too difficult to follow" way, but in
leaving too little time to just *observe*.

  Sure, some of the details shine through.  The racist squabbling
between the factory workers; the factory manager that doesn't know his
employees' names; the low-quality bar that Joel and Dean hang out in
regularly; Cindy's simplistic con; the broad strokes of dealing with the
neighbor; the attempted worker strike.  These moments felt like Mike Judge.
The rest felt like Judge was struggling to keep up with his story.  And
those moments just didn't seem real to me - the coincidences, the
considered (rather than casual) cruelty, the straight-up idiocy.

  I didn't wait through the whole credits; I almost left before they
wrapped up a couple of the story lines.  That tells me what I needed to
know.

  At least the viral Beavis and Butthead video promoting the movie
was satisfying...

  * 3/4

                           - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin at killfile.org)
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