Posted: 09/10/2006

Idiocracy

(2006)

by Michael Jones

Mike Judge, the purveyor of Beavis and Butt-head, seems pissed. In the mid-’90s, his duo of animated lug-headed grunge slackers carried the torch for lug-headed grunge slackers everywhere, Judge’s satire of stupidity presumably lost on them. Ten years later, he gives us Idiocracy, a movie determined to make sure the stupid people he’s been sneering at so much get the point: they’re stupid.

Idiocracy is a thesis film barely veiled as a dumb comedy. It aims its bullets at frenzied advertising, rapacious corporations, and overbreeding of hillbillies and valley girls and slackers whose vocabulary is populated solely with “fuck” and “shit” and “like” and “stuff.” Is it fair? Or even more pressing, is the film as secretly smart as it strives to be, like the sly Mean Girls and Harold and Kumar before it?

Luke Wilson plays Joe Bower, an Army soldier so average he’s square in the middle of bell curves charting everything from intelligence to physical health. For strictly that reason, he’s chosen as one of two test subjects for a government-run cryo-freezing experiment. Since the Army can’t find any willing female participants, they must recruit Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute who’s spunky and street-smart enough but terrified of her offscreen pimp, Upgrayedd.

Joe and Rita hop into their cryogenic chambers with the promise that they’ll awaken in a year. Long montage short, things go awry, and Joe and Rita wake up in the year 2505, where everyone eats dollops of cheese from large buckets and wears clothing crowded with more garish ads than a Tokyo street, while watching the #1 hit show, Ow! My Balls (which is exactly what it sounds like). When they aren’t grunting and staring like the most indifferent of George Romero’s zombies, the speech patterns of these 26th-century denizens are cribbed from—and Mike Judge does this with a creepy amount of success—the vernacular of their 2006 counterparts, even the self-professed smarties among us. Y’know, like, how we say “Aw, man, fuck that shit!” and stuff. Like, y’know? Shit. They’re like Beavis and Butt-head re-rendered by Philip K. Dick.

As mean-spirited and audience-hating as this all may seem, it’s still quite a lot of fun. Mike Judge’s hilarious/hellish future is one of the most joyfully drawn since the trips to 2015 and a nightmare 1985 in Back to the Future Part II. The gags are broad but fresh, not the least of which includes the supplanting of the earth’s water supply with a sports drink (“It’s got electrolytes” does get funnier each time it’s repeated), the naming of characters after brand names (Joe’s sidekick is a stunned dude named Frito), and the populating of the Oval Office with a cabinet that wears XXXL-bling-sized medals proclaiming their important titles and the president himself, a freakish lightning bolt of a wrestler who gives middle fingers instead of Nixon’s peace signs. The most uproarious moment comes during a visit to a literally city-sized Costco, when a jaded employee greets Joe and Co. with a line too classic to spoil here.

Crash worked despite (or because of) its blatant lack of subtlety, and to a degree, Idiocracy does, too. Considering its goals, its audience, its utter anger at not only stupidity but complacency (in a surprisingly thoughtful running gag, Joe is mistakenly known as “Not Sure” throughout the film), the filmmakers’ means of achieving its aims are as intact as they can be. It’s hard to disagree with Mike Judge and his view of declining intelligence in a society that not only celebrates but forgives the lack thereof. The film, all dumb jokes and obvious message, is insightful, but barely. It’s average. But at least it tried, and simply asks us, an audience apparently full of wrongful Beavis and Butt-head worshippers, to do the same.

Michael Jones is a film critic living in Chicago.

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