Toil and Trouble: Extract and My One and Only Mike Judge has another workplace comedy; My One and Only is simply belabored.

Mike Judge reportedly started writing the script for Extract when Office Space was released 10 years ago. The latter’s poor box office returns and critical reception shelved the new project, but then, Family Guy–style, Office Space rocketed to cult status in its DVD and cable afterlife, and the Beavis and Butt-head creator and undeniable master of the brilliantly stupid regained some measure of respect. So now we get Extract, Judge’s new workplace comedy, in which the common 9-to-5 man still wants to burn the building down—but this time, sympathies lie with the boss, not with the working stiffs.

Extract is no Office Space, but it’s amiable enough to produce constistent chuckles, if only the occasional gut-busting laugh. Joel (Jason Bateman) is the founder and on-site owner of Reynold’s Extracts, a plant whose employees have the usual gripes but also the benefit of being able to jaw at the owner himself, whose office oversees the production floor.

At first, Joel’s main dissatisfaction is with his wife (Kristen Wiig), who rarely puts out. He’s optimistic about the potential of a company buyout that would let him retire. But then an employee gets injured on the job—thanks to a stubborn, racist old biddy (Beth Grant), who wears shirts with angel-winged cats and who bitches more than she works—and the possibility of a lawsuit threatens to sour the sale. A welcome, if morally vexing, distraction arrives soon enough in the form of a smokin’ temp, Cindy (Mila Kunis). Cindy flirts with Joel, and he confesses his temptation to a longtime friend and drug-pushing bartender, Dean (a shaggy, hippie-ish Ben Affleck). Dean’s advice? It’s obvious: Hire a gigolo (Dustin Milligan) to seduce his wife. If she goes for it, Joel can then pursue Cindy guilt-free.

Not that reality is a prime concern in such a satire, but anyone who’s seen Extract’s trailer and thought, Yeah, right, someone as hot as Cindy would end up working in a plant? can be reassured that there’s actually a solid (and initially surprising) reason she applies for a job there. And gigolos and testicle-busting chain-reaction mishaps aside, the film is terrific at portraying the dreariness of most people’s cyclical work-home-TV-bed existence. Nearly every character is recognizable and funny without being over-the-top, including J.K. Simmons as the plant’s manager (who doesn’t bother to remember his employees’ names, instead content to mock the way they speak) and Clifton Collins Jr., this year’s Indie “it” guy, the hickish if good-hearted clock-puncher who gets sidelined in the aforementioned accident. Even Gene Simmons, as frightening as he looks, isn’t totally cartoonish as the heavily advertised ambulance-chaser who wants to squeeze Joel out of business.

Bateman is also a good choice for the dry, under-reacting leader of the blind. He can get a laugh with a blank stare (a scene in which he’s negotiating with Brad, the dense male hooker, is terrific) or a well-timed cough (a pot-smoking sequence with Dean and a gigantic bong is one of the few laugh-out-loud moments). As always, Judge is adept at wringing humor out of little things, such as Joel’s attempt to slam down a cell phone or Brad’s seduction of his wife, shot with the faded look of an old porno. As the film ambles agreeably toward its end, you’ll realize that although Reynold’s Extracts is no Initech, it won’t be the project that puts Judge out of business.

It’s 1953, and a fading Southern socialite has left her philandering husband and dragged her two sons from New York to California in search of a new life. When her younger boy, George, expresses his cynical reservations for about the billionth time, she suggests he head for the beach: “Go get yourself some color, George, you’re paler than a nun’s behind!”

It’d be just a throwaway joke in any other film, but in My One and Only, the line is actually a wink—for this is the fictionalized adolescence of George Hamilton, now known more for his tan than for his acting career. Really, though, that fact is so insignificant you’re more likely to discover it while reading about the film than from the story’s tiny clues. The plot instead focuses on Mom, Ann Devereaux (Renée Zellweger), whose self-involvement and self-delusion are as deep as Hamilton’s skin tone. When Ann leaves George’s father (Kevin Bacon), she gives the 15-year-old boy (Logan Lerman) a wad of cash to go buy a Cadillac for the trio (including fey half-brother, Robbie, played by Mark Rendall) to tool around the country in. Ann subsequently arrives in each city—including Boston, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis—expecting to quickly catch a new sugar daddy. When that doesn’t pan out, it’s on to the next.

One of the problems of My One and Only, brought to you by the director of 2004’s awful Wimbledon (Richard Loncraine) and the writer of 1998’s atrocious Krippendorf’s Tribe (Charlie Peters), is that there’s little variance on Ann’s cycle of move, meet, flame out, repeat. She almost always runs into an old beau or potential conquest the day she arrives in a new place, and that man almost always has a spectacular flaw, such as being a shameless, broke drunk or so mentally ill as to repeatedly get engaged to women despite already having a wife—all to serve the film’s wannabe-screwball sensibility, of course, while Zellweger scrunches, mugs, and pouts.

Loncraine adorns his period piece with the proper flair, from a big-band soundtrack to sharply tailored clothes. From the opening scene, though—with Zellweger’s and, more egregiously, Bacon’s grating accents—it all feels like cheap dress-up. There are too many quips (especially the queenly, oh snap! type from Robbie), too many moments that scream Acting! (dramatic turn-aways and studied recoils), too much spoken insistence that Ann is unsinkable, plucky, and, most distractingly, a great beauty. (Sorry, Renée, you may be nicely polished here, but your prettiness has grown too odd to be considered ravishing). Lerman—who, if anyone, deserves to be singled out for looks—is the sole highlight, with a confident yet natural turn as the film’s narrator and only non-caricatured voice of reason. But he can’t save a story that comes across as contrived and ultimately forgettable. At the very end of My One and Only, we finally see how George Devereaux started taking his first steps toward becoming George Hamilton. Had the filmmakers condensed the Mommy nonsense and developed the story from here, they might have shaped a watchable biopic instead of a generic road-trip/coming-of-age/up-by-your-bootstraps hybrid.