'Extract' an unromantic comedy flavored with fun and forgiveness

Mike Judge's unromantic comedy "Extract" has lots of fun with incredibly flawed and funny people stuck in incredibly flawed and funny relationships, all performing incredibly flawed and funny actions.

Still, fans of Judge's earlier works - the spot-on cubicle satire "Office Space" and the Darwinesque, futuristic farce "Idiocracy" (and let's not forget "Beavis and Butthead") - may be a bit disappointed in the relative conventionality of "Extract."

Just as it sets us up for a critical skewering of marriage, friendships and corporate loyalties, "Extract" retracts all the subversive observations we expect it to make and settles for a warm and fuzzy, if not utterly unrealistic, reaffirmation of faith in people's ability to do the right thing. (Given that, "Extract" will probably become Judge's biggest commercial hit to date.)

Jason Bateman, well on his way to becoming one of Hollywood's most durable leading man/character actor combinations, stars as Joel, a self-made man whose chemistry talents enabled him to create a small empire in the world of flavor extracts.

Every day, he judiciously directs a factory full of blue-collar types who fixate on the tiniest of issues to fill out their daily quotas of grumbling.

Every night, Joel beats it out of his office to be home before 8 p.m., the magic hour when his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) ties on her sweatpants, signifying that there won't be any action in the boudoir that night.

One day, a new ultrahot employee named Cindy (Mila Kunis) catches Joel's eye, along with other body parts. He contemplates ways he can hit on Cindy and cheat on Suzie, but somehow feel justified in doing it.

This is where Joel's best pal Dean proposes a plot. Dean, a long-haired, laid-back post-hippy bartender played by Ben Affleck, suggests that Joel hire a friend of his, the rakishly handsome but woefully shallow Brad (Dustin Milligan), to seduce Suzie. That way, Joel can maneuver Cindy into the sack as sort of retribution. Everyone's happy.

Joel doesn't realize just how good Brad can be at his "job." He also doesn't realize that Cindy is an opportunistic parasite and thief. So when a loyal company employee named Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) loses his manhood (ouch!) through a freak accident, Cindy's influential manipulations convince Step to sue Joel for so much money, his extract factory may become defunct.

The legal problems come at a very bad time for Joel, who hoped to sell his company to a highly interested General Mills. If Joel and his right-arm supervisor Brian (the great, natural comic character actor J.K. Simmons) can't stop the suit, General Mills might lose all interest in their successful factory.

Judge, who wrote and directed "Extract," takes a potentially savage satire and bends it toward a traditional Hollywood wrap-up, happy ending and all. I argue that this isn't strictly a commercial sellout. Rather, it's Judge's assertion of the power of forgiveness as one of life's true survival tactics.

As the vacuously handsome stud muffin, Milligan demonstrates remarkable comic timing intermingled with an unexpected vulnerability. An appreciative shout-out goes to David Koechner, whose intrusively talkative next-door neighbor Nathan assaults poor Joel every night with a passive-aggressive barrage of verbiage that threatens to thwart Joel's 8 p.m. booty call.

Pay particular attention to George S. Clinton's bouncy, plucky score. The composer uses musicians playing real extract bottles in the orchestra. Talk about flavoring the music.