Featured Movies
Partners
IdiocracyAbandoned without previews or marketing in the US and sent straight to DVD in the UK, Idiocracy has been treated as someone with fingerless mittens would handle raw sewage.
Incredibly, this is the second time writer-director Mike Judge has been dumped this way. In 1999, despite his track record with 'Beavis And Butt-Head' Judge's debut feature Office Space was similarly ditched. Deservedly, it went on to become a word-of-mouth cult hit and Judge must hope the same fate awaits Idiocracy.
Given that the film sends up what happens when the morons take over, and the fact that it was released in the month that major studios see fit to champion dross like Norbit, it's tempting to imagine that Judge hasn't made a futuristic satire at all, but a slice-of-life docudrama.
Those who cast Idiocracy aside would argue - correctly - that it's blunt, crass, wildly uneven and struggles to fill its 84 minutes. What this overlooks is that it's also stuffed with inspired sight gags, one-liners and more genuine comic insight than the collected works of Adam Sandler and Martin Lawrence combined. Like Office Space, it's actually about something, namely the dumbing down of modern life.
The slide begins in the early 21st century with trailer trash out-breeding MENSA members at an alarming rate. Judge then extrapolates a consumerist future so stupid that technology has run down and garbage mountains have piled up. Government members are sponsored by burger chains, fields are fertilized with Gatorade and Starbucks offers handjobs with their lattes. Everyone speaks in a gumbo of hillbilly, Valley girl and Ebonics. Reading is for "fags" and the hit TV show 'Ow! My Balls!' consists of repeated shots of a guy getting whacked in the knackers.
Into this Dystopia For Dummies awakes Private Joe Bowers (Wilson), who was cryogenically frozen in a military experiment along with smart-mouth hooker Rita (Rudolph) and forgotten about until, in 2505, he emerges as the world's smartest man by default, and is co-opted to save the world. Judge and co-writer Etan Cohen have a lot of fun at the expense of imbeciles everywhere. Their futuristic exaggeration has clear precedents in our own present, where tabloid papers, reality TV and Paris Hilton have become cultural touchstones.
In fact so much creative energy seems to have been spent on the ideas behind this brand-brainwashed, TV-addicted, fast food-guzzling intellectual apocalypse, that the meagre storyline that fronts it runs out of steam pretty quickly. The low-wattage cast doesn't help, and nor does the cheap-and-cheerful CGI. Nevertheless Idiocracy still outwits most mainstream Hollywood comedies, and the shameful treatment of Judge's film points the finger not only at tomorrow's dolts but those currently churning out lowest-common denominator product. Next up: the Wayans brothers get funding for their big-screen version of 'Ow! My Balls!'
|
