In February of 1999, 20th Century Fox released Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge’s live action directorial debut, the workplace comedy Office Space, in relative cloak-and-dagger fashion. This was surprising since the feature film spin-off of his animated hit, the willfully warped road trip Beavis and Butt-head Do America, had rung up considerable critical praise and over $60 million in theatrical receipts for Paramount just over two years earlier. Office Space only grossed $10 million in theaters, but went on to sell literally millions of DVDs. Its dead-on satire of droning corporate culture struck a zeitgeist nerve — particularly with the just-out-of-college crowd who had grown up with Beavis and Butt-head — and the movie became a word-of-mouth cult hit for those in the comedic know, shrewdly dissecting workplace mundanity and undeniably laying the groundwork for the Emmy-winning American remake of The Office.



Still, that botched release is nothing compared with the treatment that Judge’s latest film, the futuristic comedy Idiocracy, received this past fall. With apologies to Yogi Berra, it could be characterized as déjà vu all over again — if only it achieved even the ignoble, air-quote heights of Office Space’s discharge. Shepherded out to 130 theaters in early September in an unpublicized, cover-of-night, seven-city dump, the movie was a corporate murder victim, plain and simple. With such an apprehensive release, fans could be forgiven for thinking that the film was a giant, steaming pile of Gigli. The thing is, it’s most decidedly not. In fact, it’s actually pretty funny — a knowingly crude satire of sustained subversiveness that frequently if not quite everlastingly touches upon brilliance.

The film commences with a brief cold open that posits our hypotheses regarding evolution have been somewhat misguided, and that over time humankind’s own development and gene pool has rewarded those who simply reproduce the most instead of the smartest and fittest. From there, the story centers on Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a soldier who’s made a career out of avoiding responsibility. Chosen for a special scientific experiment because of this very aimlessness, Joe is put into a hibernation pod for a year in order to test a military program that will allow them to freeze and store the best soldiers for when they are needed the most. Unable to find a suitably shiftless and pedestrian female candidate within their ranks to test alongside Joe, the military turns to the private sector, and recruits a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph). When the military brass in charge of the experiment gets caught up in a drug and corruption sting, Joe and Rita are forgotten, and awaken a few centuries later.

They find a world where 500 years of base pursuits, laziness, veritable inbreeding and the general lack of any rigorous intellectual application have combined to produce a slack-jawed society nearly incapable of solving even the most rudimentary problems of sanitation. Great trash heaps abound, people relieve themselves in toilet easy chairs, and the few taller buildings that haven’t collapsed are tied together with massive cables. Over the years, the burger chain Fuddrucker’s has morphed into Buttfuckers; Starbucks gives hand-jobs with its lattes; and tax refunds can be received in the form of further sexual gratification.

Everyone speaks in a mashed-up dialect of hillbilly, Valley Girl and unchecked impulse (“Like, man, I like sex…”), and evinces the logic and processing of a stoner attempting to retrace his footsteps and explain the events of his day. The top celebrity in the nation, meanwhile, is the star of a reality show called Ow, My Balls!, and the number one movie (and winner of eight Oscars, mind you) is simply called Ass, and features 90 minutes of bare-butted flatulence. Those that do “read” peruse magazines like Hot Naked Chicks & World Report.

In this environment, Joe is the smartest man alive. Derided for his “faggy talk,” Joe is picked up for not having an identifying tattoo, and his lawyer Frito (Dax Shepard) does him no favors. Joe talks his way out of prison once, and reunites with Rita, but in trying to make his way to a time machine located in the cavernous depths of a city-sized Costco, eventually gets picked up and sent to Washington, D.C.

It turns out the president (Terry Crews, above left) is a five-time smackdown wrestling champion, and in a speech in front of the House of Representin’, he tasks Joe with coming up with solutions to the nation’s problems, which include awful dust storms and a lack of crops (which has, in the president’s words, negatively impacted “burrito toppings”). At first Joe resists, and merely uses his new appointment as Secretary of the Interior to procure a pardon for Rita and continue his search for said time machine. When he realizes that the country has been watering soil with omnipresent sports beverage Brawndo (“It has what plants crave… electrolytes!”) instead of water, though, he tries to affect change.

It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but Judge’s satirical touch — while drawing most of its inspiration from outlandishly crude arenas — is remarkably adroit and complete. There’s also just something perversely right about casting Luke Wilson — who’s managed to out-bland Edward Burns as a leading man — as the arithmetically affirmed, most completely average guy in the world. After all, when Matthew McConaughey, Vince Vaughn, Mark Ruffalo and his older brother Owen (among many others) won’t return a studio’s calls or yield to their rom-com solicitations, his is the name finally bandied about to place opposite Reese Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore, Kate Hudson or other some up-and-coming starlet. Just call him Mr. Stop-Gap. Judge also gets great mileage out of some surprisingly effective special effects work. For all the future-thought tidbits and touches on display in sci-fi flicks like Minority Report, Idiocracy is likewise steadfast and, dare I say, amusingly intelligent about the extension of its basic conceit.

Unfortunately, 20th Century Fox’s DVD release of the movie is hardly a better treatment than its theatrical dumping. The movie is presented in an anamorphic widescreen transfer that’s clear and free of grain, and it comes with a robust English language 5.1 surround sound audio track, a Spanish language Dolby surround sound track and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. Apart from an animated main menu screen that is quite cluttered and somewhat difficult to navigate, the only bonus feature is a collection of five deleted scenes, running a total of three minutes and 20 seconds. The bulk of these are meaningless interstitials, but two contrasting scenes show a phone call between Joe and his girlfriend before the experiment, and her attempts to reach him afterward, presumably when he is cryogenically sealed up and asleep for a year. I suppose it’s also worth mentioning, in some parallel future world, that the language menu does feature a set of bare (male) buttocks. The lack of other extras is frustrating, all the more so because of the movie’s quality. Audio commentary from Judge about the behind-the-scenes scoop on Idiocracy’s long, strange path would have been a real hoot; here’s hoping the full, true story comes out some day. A- (Movie) C- (Disc)