Credit: www.impawards.com
Director:
Mike Judge
Cast:
Luke Wilson……….Pvt. Joe Bowers
Maya Rudolph……….Rita
Dax Shepard……….Frito
Terry Crews……….President Camacho
Justin Long………Doctor
Stephen Root……….Judge Hank “The Hangman” BMW
Sara Rue………Attorney General
Twentieth Century Fox presents Idiocracy. Written by Mike Judge and Etan Cohen. Story by Judge. Rated R (for language and sex-related humor). Running time: 84 minutes.
Just so we’re clear, Idiocracy is not a Michael Moore documentary about the ineptitude of the Bush administration. Instead, director Mike Judge revamps Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and gives it a futuristic twist. Army Private Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) follows the status quo. He’s neither a leader nor a follower. He’s someone who will get out of the way and not participate. So consider him mystified when the Pentagon assigns him to a special hush-hush “Human Hibernation Project” – a project designed so that the military can save their best soldiers and insure their training won’t go to waste during peacetime.
Joe proved to be the perfect guinea pig. He was far from the smartest. Downright average, really. (Average Joe, get it?) But taking into consideration his single status, and that he has no friends or surviving relatives, it made it even easier to conceal the project in case something goes haywire. Joining him is a freelance hooker named Rita (Maya Rudolph); the government agrees to drop some of the criminal charges levied against her in exchange for her participation.
If movies have taught us anything, they have taught us that projects involving hibernation or cryogenic freezing are never brought to fruition as they were originally intended. Mistakes are always made, whether government funding is cut, or plugs are pulled. Nothing like that occurs this time. No, apparently the head of the project is busted for participating in a prostitution ring. Our tax dollars hard at work.
So what was to be a one-year sleep turns out to be five-century slumber. In that time the intelligence curve has flat-lined, thus leading to a dumb-downed society. Seemingly those of higher intellect were too insecure about procreating, which allows for white trash, Jerry Springer zealots to extend their family tree way into the stratosphere.
Men like Frito (Dax Shepard). No doubt named after the Frito-Lay chip, he’s as dumb as they come. When Joe’s hibernation casket crashes into his apartment, Frito is unimpressed. He hardly bats an eye away from his favorite TV program, “Ow, My Balls”. Believe it or not, Frito is a lawyer. He got his degree while shopping at a Costco-like store. Scary thought, that diplomas are so easily attained and that the fate of others is in his hands. So when Joe is apprehended for not being a legal resident – he lacks the UPC code that all citizens have tattooed on their wrists – Frito represents him. You know things are bad when your lawyer starts to side with the prosecution.
Despite the accessibility to Bachelor and Masters degrees, the country is still a dump. Literally. Centuries of trash pick-ups have turned landfills into massive compost mountains. Most of the country is a dust bowl due to insufficient farming techniques, and big business literally has its name branded on everything. Even the U.S. government isn’t immune to being labeled by the likes of AOL/Time Warner and Taco Bell.
Trying to acclimate to his new surroundings, Joe is found to be the most intelligent person alive. Such acumen gives him the stigma of being called “gay”. So I take it gays are smarter just because they don’t procreate with the opposite sex, and thus aren’t able to destroy the ever-diminishing gene pool?
What starts out as an interesting send-up about our declining education system, quickly turns into an unexciting futuristic comedy. One could easily be dumbfounded by the dumbness of it all. It is apparent that Mike Judge wanted to represent a world where everyone acted like his early creations, Beavis and Butt-Head. Two idiots are fine, an entire civilization not so much. But with the PG-13 rated Office Space – a comedy that really nailed home the day-to-day monotony faced by millions of cubicle worker-bees – Judge gave us a movie so far removed from his “Huh, huh, huh cool” dimwits. With Idiocracy he takes a step back. The bland characters are intentional, as are their actions, but when a comedy’s success is resorting to profanity jokes and double entendres to raise a laugh, well, then, that could be seen as a sign of desperation.
We are given some amusing situations, however. The manner in which Luke Wilson avoids his prison sentence is clever, only because the stupidity shown in the sentencing process. But most of the laughs are few and far between, stretched over a 84-minute span. Plus the humor depicted has been done much better in other stranger-in-a-strange-land scenarios.
