Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Extract (2009)

Jason Bateman plays his usual easily confused, mediocre dude as the owner of a factory that makes flavor extracts. One of his employees is injured in a workplace accident, then convinced to sue them by a drifter (Mila Kunis) and hires a lawyer played by Gene Simmons. Meanwhile, Bateman is frustrated because his wife (Kirsten Wiig) is never in the mood, and takes terrible advice from a bartender friend of his (Ben Affleck.) There's also a whole subplot where their annoying neighbor won't take the hint and keeps bugging them about attending a Rotary Club dinner (at $55/plate.)

This movie never comes together, just lurching from one thread to the other with little connection between the two. Bateman seems dissatisfied with his life and eager to sell his factory, which presumably will give him more time around his wife when she might not be too tired for sex. But then Kunis shows up, and suddenly he's like, "well, having sex with this other woman would be just as good," not realizing she's a crook. So he accepts what may have been a horse tranquilizer from Affleck and deciding yes, hiring a gigolo as a pool cleaner to induce Wiig to have an affair, so he can cheat guilt-free, is a good idea.

This turns out to be a predictably terrible idea, but the movie focuses more on how the pool boy (who looks like dollar store Ryan Gosling as Ken) fell in love with Wiig and how much this pisses off Bateman. Then he sleeps with Kunis after figuring out she's behind the lawsuit and she starts crying. Which doesn't turn out to be her playing a trick. She sleeps with him, then just disappears (with the injured worker's pickup truck.) The lawsuit subplot peters out, the annoying neighbor subplot ends abruptly and absurdly at the end of the movie, and maybe Wiig and Bateman are going to fix things.

The movie wastes Wiig and Kunis, never really giving them much time to get into their characters and what makes them tick. It wastes JK Simmons, too. Affleck playing a loser, stoner bartender is the closest it comes to having a character that is actually funny.

No comments: