Extract: Critic Reviews

Didn't Judge realize that Extract, with its plastic setups and one-dimensional harpies, plays like Kevin Smith remaking a bad George Segal comedy from 1978?

Fitfully funny with a low joke-to-minute ratio, Extract plays like two irreconcilable and unfinished sketches, neither particularly fertile comedic terrain.

Has many promising ingredients, yet somehow none of them quite gel.

Judge may not have the workplace comedy down as smoothly as, say, Judd Apatow does with relationship comedies, but he has an ear for comical dialogue and an eye for a top-notch ensemble cast.

Extract may be the most disappointing American comedy of the decade, partly because it's jokeless and joyless but mostly because it squanders an all-star cast of superb comic talent.

There's classic screwball comedy lurking in this material, a cynic's recognition that the world runs crookedly. But the movie is logy and repetitive.

Here for Labor Day -- a comedy about the hilarity and heartbreak of running a small business.

The entire cast, in fact, seems to be having fun, with Affleck and Koechner cheerfully stealing each one of their scenes.

Mr. Judge has done better, more pointed work before, notably in the cult-favorite workplace comedy Office Space.

There are some priceless character turns.

These days, it appears to be a rare gift to do comedy in a way that comes across as smart, but never superior or willfully crass. Bateman has that talent to spare.

Some will find Judge's politics liberal; some will suggest they're conservative; I would simply say that they're American, in the best possible sense of the word, and Frank Capra might have found a lot to admire in "Extract," even with the d--- jokes.

A comedy need not be believable. But it needs to seem as if it's believable at least to itself.

Mike Judge's Extract -- modest, no big deal but very savvy -- is the funniest American comedy of the summer.

Mike Judge has become our most dogged examiner of middle-American foolishness; no other comedy filmmaker more skillfully exploits that nagging sense that you're surrounded by idiots.

A mix of coolheaded cultural satire and anxiety-inducing workplace and marital shenanigans, Extract is an odd project. It's smarter than most of the comedies out there right now, but that doesn't necessarily make it funnier.

Bateman suffers under an ever-mounting pile of indignities with strained patience. Most viewers will probably view the fitfully amusing movie the same way.

It has all the ingredients for cult immortality and will likely live on long after this year's Oscar winners are forgotten.

A curious combination of workplace comedy and midlife crisis, it's not as good as [Judge's] best work -- the characters are too one-dimensional -- but the laughs are generous and genuine.

The pic's attempts at comic portraiture feel sketchy at best, more or less assigning each character a single, belabored trait.

Extract is a real tour de force for Bateman, who finally has a big-screen role that plays to his Arrested Development strength -- a guy dismayed at how moronic those around him can be.

'Extract': Mike Judge's Retro Jack Lemmon Movie

Mocking an officious middle-manager is always fair game; ridiculing blue-collar workers who resent their mindless jobs just feels mean.

This isn't a misanthropic picture; its true subject is the way love for our fellow human beings is so often thwarted by their actual behavior -- and still, stupidly perhaps, we just won't give up on them.