Idiocracy

Scott Hardie: “It was ok.”

It should have been great. Mike Judge does satire very well, that is when people realize he's being satirical, and who better to rail against the dumbing-down of America? His plot sends two ordinary people 500 years into the future, where they are the smartest people on Earth due to successively stupider generations. It inverts Judge's Beavis and Butt-head concept (two idiots in a normal world), and sets up a comic goldmine for taking stupid-American jokes to their logical extreme. But a funny thing happened on the way to the punchline: The movie got so into its lame trying-to-escape-the-thought-police-and-return-to-present-day plotline that it neglected to include many gags. Imagine Office Space with half as many jokes and you have an idea of the comedy wattage here. Some of the material is very funny, and the deleted scenes hint that more good material was cut out, but poor test screenings sapped the studio's nerve and this was re-edited for a disappointing quickie release so fast you could've blinked and missed it. It's an ironic shame that morons in the audience are to blame for turning a smart satire of stupidity into a moronic let-down.

− June 17, 2007 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply