#590 - 591 September 11, 2009 - September 25, 2009
all movies are graded out of four stars ()
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Mike Judge's return to workplace comedy is definitely not on the level of his 1999 cult favorite Office Space, but his unmistakably dry, wry sense of humor translates into some reasonable laughs, however disposable. The storyline is a bit of a mess: a food flavoring business owner (Jason Bateman), his bartender buddy (Ben Affleck), the businessman's wife (Kristin Wiig), a gigolo (Dustin Milligan), a factory worker (Clifton Collins Jr.), and a grifter (Mila Kunis) become entangled in a complicated yet rather undernourished web of lawsuits, illicit affairs, and shady schemes. The laughs that do stick come courtesy not so much from the tangled plot but from isolated moments with the colorful characters. Milligan and Affleck obviously have a blast going for broke in their aggressively eccentric roles, while David Koechner offers some choice squirm moments as the overeager-to-the-point-of-discomfort neighbor to Wiig and Bateman, the latter of whom is an ideal fit for the harried lead. Judge's largest shortcoming is giving the game Kunis very little to do aside from looking good, but even if the whole isn't quite the sum of its parts, those parts offer enough touches of off-kilter inspiration to amuse.
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