Mini movie review: Idiocracy

One might think I would know better than to expect great things from a movie called Idiocracy.  Or even good things, really.  In all honesty, I really should have expected bad things - or at least really dumb things - from this movie.  Because that's what I got.

Starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph and Dax Shepard, the Mike Judge-penned and -helmed Idiocracy is supposed to be satire: Wilson and Rudolph are volunteers for a year-long government experiment in long-term hibernation, but are forgotten and reanimate 500 years in the future where everyone on the planet has devolved into morons.  Crops have failed, continents are giant dustbowls and the economy is in the tank.  Once the most average guy in the U.S. Army, Wilson now finds himself the smartest guy on Earth and tasked with saving it, in one week.

The movie starts sharply enough in its prologue, saying that smart people over-thought themselves out of existence (focusing on their careers before having children, trying to wait for just the right time, then waiting too long and being unable to have them) whilst the redneck dumbasses propagate like rabbits.  [Mr. Mouse looked at me at this point, saying: "This is kind of too close to reality, isn't it?"  Which was the whole point, really.]  But Idiocracy just gets dumber from there, relying on sightgags (i.e., Fuddruckers restaurant morphing over time into Buttf**kers) and lame sex jokes.  Maybe Mike Judge was getting meta - using the increasing stupidity of his movie to illuminate the increasing stupidity in the world around us - but it doesn't come off.  Idiocracy, plainly put, is pretty idiotic.