By Brian Duff
Considering the high comic standing of Mike Judge – the creator of Beavis And Butt-Head and King Of The Hill, and the writer/director of the acclaimed, generation-defining Office Space – there was something disquieting about the way in which his follow-up film, Idiocracy, was ignored by distributors around the world. After all, its subject matter is the dumbing down of humanity – a pertinent subject, and one ripe for comment – and it’s very, very funny.
Luke Wilson stars as “average” Joe Bauers, a lazy army private who undertakes a dangerous cryogenic experiment (a flimsy pretext to get him into the future) alongside a prostitute named Rita (Saturday Night Live’s Maya Rudolph). Awakening 500 years from now, he finds a world in which those with low intelligence have outbred their intellectual superiors. In this humorous dystopia, famine and pestilence threaten humanity, but daily life is generally just a sillier and coarser version of now, with lots of fast food and television.
Plot points are generally brushed aside or outright ignored as Judge strains to get across a sharp comment amongst the broad comedy. In most senses, it works. Wilson is his usual understated self, Rudolph is vulnerable and comely in equal measures, and the supporting cast is roundly hilarious in their stupidness. The script is chock full of exactly the type of slow-witted vernacular that parents grow to hate (insults range from “fag” to “tard”), and outside of a few garish flourishes, this future looks much, much closer than 500 years away.
Idiocracy has a lot to offer. It’s puerile, cheap-looking and beyond silly, but it has an undeniable sense of purpose and rates much closer to entertainment and satire than most of the high-concept, low-yield rubbish that actually finds its way into multiplexes. This now modest cult favourite has been brought up a lot since Donald Trump started his optimistic charge to The White House, and if you haven’t already seen it, there’s no better time than now.
