Film

In Office Space, bored desk jockey Ron Livingston found his true calling in construction. Extract, which is basically Factory Space, likewise chronicles the impersonality of the workplace, suggesting again (oddly) that the only jobs that count as real work are the ones you do with your hands. Joel (Bateman) built his vanilla extract company from the ground up, but as the company’s owner, he’s vulnerable to employees’ whims, the scams of a local con artist (Kunis) and the lawsuit of a forklift operator (Collins) who’s castrated in a freak assembly-line pileup. (His lawyer’s conditions for settlement provide the movie with its funniest scene.) All of the characters, except maybe the deballed dude, are out to get something they don’t deserve—including Joel, who’s advised by his bartender-psychologist (Affleck) that an ethical way to cheat on his wife (Wiig) would be to hire a dim-witted gigolo (Milligan) to seduce her first.

Scene for scene, the movie is funnier and more coherent than Judge’s unduly dumped Idiocracy. (Affleck, slumming in a lower-key manner than Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, redeems himself.) As a film in which everyone is skimming off everyone else, it’s also a perfect metaphor for a world in which bankers place bets on other people’s misery. In a happy ending, the bottom line takes a back seat to personal satisfaction. Joel is surprised to learn the guy he hires to screw his wife is willing to have sex for free.