All hail one Mike Judge, the creator of the anti heroes ‘Beavis and Butthead’, and more importantly, creator of one the wittiest, craftiest, biting movies of this era with the brilliant ‘Office Space’.  If you’ve seen ‘Office Space’ then you already know and I won’t waste any time going over the genius behind that miniature masterpiece.  However, one would think that a talent of Judge’s magnitude wouldn’t have to wait a whole seven years before getting another film made and released, at least one would think.  But here we are seven years later, and a total lack of studio support, similar to Judge’s first film with ‘Idiocracy’, yet another biting, brutal, and witty attack on American Society.

Luke Wilson is Army Private Joe Bowers, at his age, Private Bowers probably should be well into the Master Sergeant range, but Joe has very little drive and ambition.  As an aside, there is something about Luke Wilson that I just like.  The man just strikes me as a real amiable, likable type of guy.  Sure he may be a serial rapist / mass murderer in reality, but at least it doesn’t come across the screen.  Anyways, Joe is well, the ultimate Average Joe which makes him ideal to test this experiment the Army has concocted which involves freezing their best soldiers and then defrosting them when they are actually needed.  The Army also needed a woman candidate, but unfortunately no female soldiers equaled Joe’s averageness, so they went out to the ‘private sector’ and found Rita the prostitute (Maya Rudolph) who ‘volunteered’ for the experiment to avoid prosecution.

Uncontrolled circumstances leads to the Joe and Rita ultimately being forgotten for 500 years and when they awaken they are in the middle of the stupidest society on record.

Television consist of reality shows such as ‘Owww my Balls’, water has been replaced by Gatorade, corporations run society and 500 years worth garbage has created a situation that avalanches at any moment.  But Average Joe is now the smartest person on the planet and as such has gained the attention Smackdown Champ and President of the United States Camacho (Terry Crews), who has made Joe Secretary of the interior and given him one week to fix the economy, world hunger and health care.  Will Joe and Rita the ho be able to save the world before it implodes?  We will see.

There are parts of ‘Idiocracy’ that are really funny, but the production as a whole is not quite as funny as it should be.  Even though it starts out great, it does flatten out as it grooves into its narrative.  That being said, as a comedy ‘Idiocracy’ is only marginally successful, but as satire it hits every bulls-eye it aims for.  All of the problems that we face in this great society of ours is so obvious, it is a wonder someone hasn’t attacked this earlier.  I’m sure if you drop a some Victorian age cat in the year 2006 and forced him to sit down and watch an episode of Jackass on the tele, he would probably wonder how could the same group of people make this show AND a at the same time have the intelligence to create something as advanced as a television.

One flaw though with Judges thinking.  It is illustrated for us that one of the reasons for the dumbing down of society is that idiots reproduce at alarming rates while smart people usually wait for perfectly logical circumstances before procreating, and often by then it’s too late.  This may be true, but based on this logic it would mean the smart people begat more smart people and stupid people only produce more stupid people.  Trust me when I tell you that this is patently untrue.  For instance, my parents, both phenomenally intelligent people representing high academia and high armed forces have three children.  The two boys, of whom I am one, leave much to be desired intelligence wise.  The only ‘smart one’ is the girl, and she happens to adopted.  The only thing I got out of that union was the gift of gab and trickery, which enabled me to bamboozle a pretty girl who also happens to be smart (but not smart enough to see past my game) into actually marrying me.  We have produced a son who is at the same time a complete idiot, but also a gifted genius.  Most of the stupid people I know are cleaved from intelligence, while some of the smartest people I know have parents whose brains only function to make their organs run.  This is just what I see.

I guess the problem 20th Century Fox had with ‘Idiocracy’ is that it bites the hand that feeds it and bites it hard.  This is exactly which makes ‘Idiocracy’ work and it’s a shame the studio didn’t throw its support into it.  But then they threw their support behind ‘Garfield: A tale of two Kitties’. But suppose that’s Judge’s point.  Though it’s no classic along the lines of ‘Office Space’, Idiocracy is still one crazy ride worth jumping on.