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In the year 2005, the army begins an experiment in cryogenic freezing (called the Human Hibernation Project) with the intention of one day being able to freeze their best men and bring them back when they’re needed. Before the real project can begin, however, they need to test it. So they choose Private Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a totally average guy with very little ambition, no family, and very few friends. Along with Joe, they choose Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute whose pimp gives them a good deal. Joe and Rita are supposed to be brought back after a year—but when the army base is shut down, the project is forgotten, and no one’s there to wake them once the year is up.
Meanwhile, instead of becoming more and more intelligent, human beings in general get stupider and stupider, due to the fact that stupid people reproduce far more often than intelligent people. And the result is a worldwide dumbing-down.
In the year 2505, Joe awakes and finds himself in a world that’s so entirely idiotic that he’s now the smartest man alive. By far. After a brush with the legal system—for not having a bar code tattoo, and thus not being able to pay for his visit to the hospital—Joe manages (without too much effort) to escape from prison. He hunts down his incompetent lawyer, Frito (Dax Shepard), and asks him for help in finding a time machine that will get him and Rita—who’s discovering that it’s really easy to make good money as a prostitute in the future, without doing any actual work—back to 2005.
Idiocracy, the latest by Mike Judge (Office Space, TV’s Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill), is the ultimate Brainless Comedy. It’s totally stupid, but you can’t help but laugh out loud—because it makes perfect sense. It makes sense that the stupid people—who keep having more and more children (who then appear on Springer to try to find out who their daddy is)—would someday take over the world. (Actually, sometimes I feel like they already have.) And, as a result, it makes perfect sense that the President of the United States would be an Ultimate Fighting Champion. Or that the most popular TV show would be Ow! My Balls!. Or that the biggest Oscar-winning movie of the year would be nothing but a shot of someone’s butt. Idiocracy may be filled with lowbrow humor, but there’s just something brilliant about the little details that Judge works into the story. They’re funny because they’re just so spot-on.
I’ll admit that Idiocracy isn’t the most fine-tuned of films. It has its share of holes, and it’s obvious that it was made pretty cheaply. But the thrown-together feel only adds to the fun. It’s cheap, and it’s stupid, and you can’t help but laugh anyway.
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