Mike Judge's feature Idiocracy came and went from theaters in a blink - at least as quickly as his previous film Office Space, and we all know what fate eventually awaited that one on home video. It's now a cult favorite quoted frequently in cubicle-denigrated offices world wide. Idiocracy likely won't have quite the same degree of popularity in its second life, but it could have some sort of cult following.
While the plot is simple - Wilson wants to get back home, seeks a time machine, temporarily helps the President of the United States (a former pro wrestler with a James Brown meets Easy Rider persona, as played by Terry Crews) solve the drought crisis - and the mechanics of it lead to some predictability. But it's more than enough to give Judge and crew ample room to reflect upon and mock our current culture as much as its possible future path. A frightening, and frightfully funny, montage at the beginning explains the natural consequences of what happens when dolts overbreed and the intelligent underbreed. Judge is going for laughs here, too, and the film is full of slapstick humor. There are fart jokes - but hey, fart jokes can have a greater purpose. (A fart joke is a fart joke - some people will laugh, some people won't - but here it's more interested in the type of person who laughs at them over the joke itself.)The film is generally a hoot - with several laugh out loud moments. The one problem with its terrific premise is that we have to watch a film in which the majority of the characters behave like idiots, which, just as with Judge's Beavis and Butthead series, can quickly go from riotous to tedious. But he has something deeper in mind here. These idiots of the 26th century constantly denigrate (and a word like "denigrate" would get me in trouble there) anyone who appears smart in any way as a "fag" and are suspicious of things they don't understand. In a sense, Judge is fast-forwarding ahead from our current culture's fixation on the stupid, and the way intellectuals are often derided in the same way. And it took quite a bit of thought to come up with the script's hilarious lowest-common denominator s-language in the dialogue. Satire ain't easy, and is so rarely attempted these days that whatever the film's flaws one has to give Judge some props for trying - and mostly succeeding.
Parts of the film are certainly sloppy - and whether this is the result of the studio's interference, some unfinished editing, test screenings gone awry or just sloppiness on the makers' part, it's hard to be completely sure, though the evidence seems to be on the former: the voice over narration likely a late in the game addition (the guy's voice sounds like the narrator in Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, don't know if it is, or just meant to sound like him); the editing's choppy; and some of the effects could certainly be better (though this is the kind of film that almost works better with cheap-ass FX). That latter point again is likely the cause of a non-committal studio.
On the cast: Dax Shepard plays his iimbecile lawyer character Frito (most of the characters have corporate sponsored names, another great running joke) with just the right amount of sweet stupidity that he quickly grows on you. Crews' (of Everybody Hates Chris) President Camacho is a memorable comic invention, a pop-culturally elected leader with more sexual charisma and verve than brains. But more of those than his cabinet, who were all elected by various coporate-sponsored contests; David Herman, "Michael Bolton" in Office Space, is a loopy Secretary of State. And Wilson is well-cast, deadpan and exasperated Everyman who could be any of us stuck in this hellish vision of the future.
While it's certainly not in the same league cinematically, Idiocracy, in fact, may be a more frightening depiction of what nightmares may come than Children of Men.
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