This Extract Lacks Flavor

Mike Judge's Extract is a view of modern stupidity, the story of a regular guy among idiots, running a bottling plant and having trouble with his marriage. While it offers some chuckles, the Jason Bateman vehicle is no comic masterpiece:

• “What’s most striking about Extract, beyond the scarcity of jokes and absence of actual filmmaking, is its deep well of sourness, which at times borders on misanthropy,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

• The film is “sort of entertaining, but lacks the focus and comic energy of Judge's Office Space,“ notes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “A comedy need not be believable. But it needs to seem as if it's believable at least to itself.”
• Writing in USA Today, Claudia Puig is more impressed: Judge “has an ear for comical dialogue and an eye for a top-notch ensemble cast. Extract ably blends sharp humor and a sense of gleeful absurdity.”

(More Mike Judge stories.)