They're not?

Saw this tonight, LOVED IT. Hilarious from beginning to end. What a great come back for Judge after the terrible Idiocracy. Not on the level of Office Space, but thats a tall order to ask. David Koechner OWNS this movie. One of the funniest performances I have ever seen.

I thought this was incredibly mediocre. Few laughs, and rather plain or annoying characters. Bateman is just the same everyman I've seen him in in the last 3 or 4 years since Arrested Development, Kunis is cute but seemed underused and her plot unfinished, and Koechner was more grating then funny. I liked Idiocracy better, and of course Office Space far better.

Saw it Friday. It was nothing new, but a solid funny film. Entertained me. Yeah Bateman was the same as usual. His wife was a terrible actress. Aint It Cool News has been pretty much giving this movie a blow job for a week now. Definitely NOT worthy of such treatment.

Was I the only one who was expecting . . .

Huh? Out of all the AD alums, he's done the most diverse character work since the show ended. He's no Michael Cera or Will Arnett, that's for sure.

I liked it but it needed more to it, the plot should have kept winding instead of wrapping up, I wanted to see more ben affleck, maybe have them go to the party with the neighbor, etc... after it was over it all felt lazy, a better end / drawn out last act might have re-defined the rest of the movie as something better

The previews did absolutely nothing for me but went and saw it with friends who really wanted to see it. Left with the same feeling i had from the previews. I kept thinking during the movie "am i supposed to care about anything happening." Incrediblly plain movie is the best way i can describe it

Must be just the movies i've seen him in. He's pretty much just an average guy in this movie, Juno, Hancock, The Break Up, and seemingly the upcoming Couples Retreat. Never saw the Kingdom or State of Play, so maybe he's different in those films.

I liked it but didn't love it. I was laughing throughout, but not really hard laughter and a lot of it was more 'cute'/'amusing' rather than hilarious. Affleck was the bomb though and I really thought Koechner killed it...but the movie and story sort of fizzled out about 3/4 of the way through. Worth seeing for Judge fans but not his best (and not as good as some people have been saying, I'm looking at you Michael Phillips). Liked the Judge cameo as well.

it was a rather understated comedy, but I was generally entertained by it


yeah, I agree Jason does need to break out of his mold (i.e, bland characters)

This movie was fucking horrible. Just as bad, if not worse then The Goods.

Didn't like this movie either. No where near the levels of Office Space or even Idiocracy. Just didn't make me laugh. Made me want to sneak into another movie but I had prior engagements.

There's a flatness to Judge's films. Extract in particular feels underdeveloped. Mila Kunis looked amazing but her character went nowhere. Sort of like the film although there's enough good stuff (Affleck liberated, Koechner, Kunis' hotness) to maintain interest. Kristen Wiig is awful though.

I didn't mind her, but was hoping for her to have the same kind of dialogue and delivery as her character in Knocked Up. I loved her lines in that movie.

All of you thinking this movie is "flat" or "bland" are completely missing the point. The world in the film is supposed to be "bland" like real life. But the characters themselves are some of the most vivid, interesting people I have seen in a movie in some time. It reminded me of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm turned into a feature film. If you don't like that kind of humor, you probably aren't going to like this. Since most people are accustomed to slapstick and dumb humor, I think it takes some intelligence to appreciate a movie like this.

I watched this last night and liked it.

I laughed so hard during the 'accident' sequence I nearly blew a gasket.

Gene Simmons was a blast, and so many solid people in every key and even minor role.

On the surface, Joel has a pretty good life. He’s the owner of an extract plant, owns a fancy car, nice clothes and has an attractive wife. If a deal with General Mills goes through, he can get rid of the company and retire early. Underneath it all, it’s not what it seems. His wife doesn’t want to have sex with him, his best friend is a bartender who is a burnout, his neighbor is one of those nosey types who don’t shut up and one of his workers lost a testicle in a work accident.

Then one day, a gorgeous woman named Cindy, who is a petty thief, starts working at the plant in an effort to find out where the injured worker lives so she can swindle him out of the money. Strongly attracted to her, Joel doesn’t want to cheat on his wife. However, his best friend Dean convinces him that if he catches his wife cheating on him, he can feel free to cheat on her with Cindy.

Dean sets up a gigolo with his wife and thinks that he has it under control until he finds out that the gigolo went back to his house and slept with his wife again after being paid and told that it was a one-time affair.

However, things don’t go as planned and Joel’s life starts spinning out of control and he spends the rest of the movie trying to put it all back together.

Jason Bateman has always been good playing the straight man in a case of wackos and weirdos and here he’s no different here playing a guy who gets in way over his head. Kristen Wiig is underused as his wife who works from home and signals whether or not she wants to have sex by putting on sweatpants at 8:00. David Krumholtz plays the neighbor that everyone never wants to have, the kind that sticks your nose into your business and won’t get out of your face. Clifton Collins takes a break from dramas and has fun playing a redneck. Ben Affleck has a small, but hilarious role as a burnout bartender who wants nothing more than to get his next fix. J.K. Simmons pops up from time to time as Joel’s business associate and while he’s funny as usual, he’s not the scene stealer he was in the Spider-Man movies. Last, but not least, Mila Kunis delivers a credible performance as the swindler and thief who knows what she wants and will use any means necessary to get it. In her case, it’s using her looks and body to turn her victims into jello.

The weirdest turn in the movie is courtesy of Gene Simmons of the classic rock band KISS. Playing the scummy lawyer that Step, the worker who loses a testicle, hires, Simmons is over the top, but considering the local commercials that I see for lawyers, it’s a pretty good impression.

While the script isn’t as sharp, witty or satirical as Office Space, there are some pretty good lines, especially in the scenes with Ben Affleck, who is enjoying a resurgence in his career by playing the smaller roles and stepping behind the camera.

All of Mike Judge’s movies have been small moneymakers in theaters, but big money makers on home video and this movie is no exception.

3 Stars

On a shallow note: Mila Kunis looked damn good.

Substituting blue-collar blunderers for "Office Space's" white-collar workhorses, "Extract" distills meager laughs from a strange story about a cheating wife, a wily thief, a severed testicle and a hapless factory owner juggling all of the above. Mike Judge's latest bigscreen outing finds the always interesting writer-director working in a softer, less spoofy mode than usual and, a few colorful supporting characters aside, doesn't show his comedic instincts at their sharpest. But as his first live-action film granted the dignity of a proper wide release, the Sept. 4 opener could bottle modest-to-solid returns on the names of Jason Bateman and Ben Affleck.
Indeed, after the poor theatrical fortunes that befell 1999's "Office Space" (which happily rebounded as a cult fave on homevid) and 2006's underrated futuristic farce "Idiocracy," it's hard not to wish the best for "Extract." It's also hard not to wish Judge's script, having grounded its characters in a normal workaday setting -- a flavor-extract factory proudly run by Joel Reynold (Bateman) -- had chosen to use that setting as its primary comic motor, in the manner of "Office Space."

Initially, this does seem to be Judge's intent. After all, employee incompetence and complacency are to blame for the horrible (and amusingly staged) assembly-line accident that causes wannabe floor manager Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) to almost become a soprano -- and not the New Jersey kind. The setback couldn't come at a worse time for Joel, a hard-working, mild-mannered guy who's trying to sell the business, and whose own nether regions are turning blue from the chronic neglect of his chilly wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig).

Enter the factory's newest hire, Cindy, who -- as played by "Forgetting Sarah Marshall's" Mila Kunis -- is such a smokin' hottie, especially compared with her co-workers, that she immediately triggers adulterous longings in Joel. Egged on by his best friend, bartender Dean (Affleck, long-haired and laid-back), and with the help of some strong tranquilizers, Joel enlists good-looking dimwit Brad (Dustin Milligan) to seduce Suzie, which will assuage Joel's guilt and free him to pursue Cindy -- who, it's revealed early on, has her own slippery agenda.

In zeroing in on a sexually frustrated small-business owner facing a major lawsuit, Judge means to wring humor from a familiar vein of American male discontent. To that end, he surrounds Joel with an assortment of rubes and grotesques, the most memorable of which is his nightmarish neighbor Nathan (David Koechner), a balding, bespectacled irritant who never knows when to shut up or go away. Pitting Koechner's passive-aggressive drone against Bateman's Mr. Nice Guy, these agonizingly protracted sequences are the only ones that go beyond funny into squirm-inducing.

Where "Extract" does succeed is in creating a factory environment so vivid, you can almost smell the vanilla. Well lensed by Tim Suhrstedt at a water-bottling plant in California's City of Commerce, these scenes are all the more gratifying for tackling a milieu not often seen onscreen. And while they don't get much screen time, Joel's employees -- from a heavily pierced rock-star wannabe (T.J. Miller) to a stubborn shrew who sees everyone's laziness but her own (Beth Grant) -- could inspire flashes of recognition among auds, wherever they work.

Otherwise, the pic's attempts at comic portraiture feel sketchy at best, more or less assigning each character a single, belabored trait -- Joel's supervisor (J.K. Simmons) refuses to remember his workers' names, Step's lawyer (Gene Simmons) is a showboating sleaze, etc.

And while "Office Space" and "Idiocracy" registered as howls of outrage at corporate culture and mass stupidity, respectively, "Extract" has little of their satirical energy or underlying anger. It skewers marriage, entrepreneurship and manual labor only to reaffirm them in the final stretch, and in a way that doesn't feel especially bighearted (like Judge's toon series "King of the Hill"), just soft-headed.

Bateman's likable straight-man routine proves reliably watchable, and while he and Affleck don't strike up much in the way of buddy chemistry, a shared scene of massive pot inhalation does score a direct hit. But the pic again shows Judge's difficulty writing female characters of substance (not that he's alone among male comedy scribes in that respect): Kunis is fine (in both senses) as a gold-digging seductress, but Wiig, so side-splitting in her throwaway appearances in "Knocked Up" and "Ghost Town," is given no such opportunities in an ostensibly meatier role.

Tech credits are pro, though George S. Clinton's overworked score is of the fill-in-the-laughs variety.

Substituting blue-collar blunderers for "Office Space's" white-collar workhorses, "Extract" distills meager laughs from a strange story about a cheating wife, a wily thief, a severed testicle and a hapless factory owner juggling all of the above. Mike Judge's latest bigscreen outing finds the always interesting writer-director working in a softer, less spoofy mode than usual and, a few colorful supporting characters aside, doesn't show his comedic instincts at their sharpest. But as his first live-action film granted the dignity of a proper wide release, the Sept. 4 opener could bottle modest-to-solid returns on the names of Jason Bateman and Ben Affleck.
Indeed, after the poor theatrical fortunes that befell 1999's "Office Space" (which happily rebounded as a cult fave on homevid) and 2006's underrated futuristic farce "Idiocracy," it's hard not to wish the best for "Extract." It's also hard not to wish Judge's script, having grounded its characters in a normal workaday setting -- a flavor-extract factory proudly run by Joel Reynold (Bateman) -- had chosen to use that setting as its primary comic motor, in the manner of "Office Space."

Initially, this does seem to be Judge's intent. After all, employee incompetence and complacency are to blame for the horrible (and amusingly staged) assembly-line accident that causes wannabe floor manager Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) to almost become a soprano -- and not the New Jersey kind. The setback couldn't come at a worse time for Joel, a hard-working, mild-mannered guy who's trying to sell the business, and whose own nether regions are turning blue from the chronic neglect of his chilly wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig).

Enter the factory's newest hire, Cindy, who -- as played by "Forgetting Sarah Marshall's" Mila Kunis -- is such a smokin' hottie, especially compared with her co-workers, that she immediately triggers adulterous longings in Joel. Egged on by his best friend, bartender Dean (Affleck, long-haired and laid-back), and with the help of some strong tranquilizers, Joel enlists good-looking dimwit Brad (Dustin Milligan) to seduce Suzie, which will assuage Joel's guilt and free him to pursue Cindy -- who, it's revealed early on, has her own slippery agenda.

In zeroing in on a sexually frustrated small-business owner facing a major lawsuit, Judge means to wring humor from a familiar vein of American male discontent. To that end, he surrounds Joel with an assortment of rubes and grotesques, the most memorable of which is his nightmarish neighbor Nathan (David Koechner), a balding, bespectacled irritant who never knows when to shut up or go away. Pitting Koechner's passive-aggressive drone against Bateman's Mr. Nice Guy, these agonizingly protracted sequences are the only ones that go beyond funny into squirm-inducing.

Where "Extract" does succeed is in creating a factory environment so vivid, you can almost smell the vanilla. Well lensed by Tim Suhrstedt at a water-bottling plant in California's City of Commerce, these scenes are all the more gratifying for tackling a milieu not often seen onscreen. And while they don't get much screen time, Joel's employees -- from a heavily pierced rock-star wannabe (T.J. Miller) to a stubborn shrew who sees everyone's laziness but her own (Beth Grant) -- could inspire flashes of recognition among auds, wherever they work.

Otherwise, the pic's attempts at comic portraiture feel sketchy at best, more or less assigning each character a single, belabored trait -- Joel's supervisor (J.K. Simmons) refuses to remember his workers' names, Step's lawyer (Gene Simmons) is a showboating sleaze, etc.

And while "Office Space" and "Idiocracy" registered as howls of outrage at corporate culture and mass stupidity, respectively, "Extract" has little of their satirical energy or underlying anger. It skewers marriage, entrepreneurship and manual labor only to reaffirm them in the final stretch, and in a way that doesn't feel especially bighearted (like Judge's toon series "King of the Hill"), just soft-headed.

Bateman's likable straight-man routine proves reliably watchable, and while he and Affleck don't strike up much in the way of buddy chemistry, a shared scene of massive pot inhalation does score a direct hit. But the pic again shows Judge's difficulty writing female characters of substance (not that he's alone among male comedy scribes in that respect): Kunis is fine (in both senses) as a gold-digging seductress, but Wiig, so side-splitting in her throwaway appearances in "Knocked Up" and "Ghost Town," is given no such opportunities in an ostensibly meatier role.

Tech credits are pro, though George S. Clinton's overworked score is of the fill-in-the-laughs variety.

I also didn't care for this movie. While I can understand trying to portray a meager and dull life, there is certainly humor to be drawn from the subject of which this movie fails to do. The Mila Kunis character is completely wasted (though fantastic eye candy).

A few very funny parts surrounded by a load of blah. King of the Hill did a much better job of distilling humor from a somewhat dull life.

Movie is actually really funny stumbled across it , seen Jason Bateman was in it with Ben Affleck and Mila Kunis it is actually really funny but something to watch on a rainy day

This is on Netflix (new?).

Good movie. I really appreciate Mike Judge's straighforward, simple storytelling. There's no prolonged character switchbacks or cons. He doesn't use film conventions to trick anyone. It's simple and what you're told is really what you're getting.

So he tells the story like that. And then packs in the normal Mike Judge humor.