Idiocracy
(2006)

The first time that I saw Office Space, I was among the vast majority of people who were amused but not overly impressed by the film in its initial release. Now, it's hard to deny that the movie was one of the most grossly underrated and influential films of the nineties. It was a silly little movie that skewered American culture on the sly. You know, the kind of movie that slants reality so minutely that you are forced to laugh at how ridiculous your own life is. Idiocracy, Mike Judge's long-awaited follow-up, forgoes all subtlety in favor of a headlong attack on American low-culture, and it is this "take no prisoners" tactic that I think is the film's biggest flaw.

Luke Wilson plays Joe Bauers, a slacker in a soldier's uniform, who is enlisted to test a "Human Hibernation" program. Along with a prostitute named Rita (played by Maya Rudolph) he is cryogenically frozen to be thawed in a year's time. After some epic bumbling on the part of government officials, the experiment is forgotten and essentially buried. Five hundred years later the pair defrost in a future where, instead of advancing, the human race has devolved into grunting, tv-addicted louts with no ability to take care of themselves. The regressed Americans quickly identify the "faggy-talking" Bauers as an outsider and attempt to arrest him for crimes he didn't commit. A game of functionally retarded cat and mouse ensues as Joe and Rita attempt to locate a time machine that the populace has long since forgotten how to repair.

Ironically, it's the things that most other movies do quite poorly that Judge gets right in Idiocracy. In lesser hands the convoluted voice-over explanation of exactly how the world fell into stupidity would have brought the action of the film to a screeching halt. Judge, however, uses the narration to catapult the audience into the storyline with a hilarious comparison between the reproductive tendencies of cultured Americans and hillbillies. The premise is a hard sell, but one I bought into with gusto.

Make no mistake. There is much in Idiocracy to laugh at (there are countless sight-gags that had me laughing out loud!), but often the laughs seem to come too easy. In Office Space, Mike Judge exposed the hilarious hypocrisies and inanities of life in the very demographic the film was aimed at. It was a risky venture, but one that paid off in spades ... eventually. In Idiocracy, though, you can't help feeling that Judge is poking fun at "those" people. It's easy comedy, and when you aim for the easy targets certain ethical questions begin to arise. When I see the future's most popular television program, "Ow! My Balls!" I honestly don't know whether I'm laughing at the descendants of WWE loving hillbillies or (now this is scary) WITH them!

In the end, coming out of Idiocracy, I feel a lot like I did coming out of Office Space. Sure it was amusing, but it didn't do a lot of things to impress me. And with this movie, I can't imagine that opinion changing a lot. I dunno... check in with me again in five hundred years.

Here's a movie clip, fag.

Labels: dvd