Keeping America Stupid: The End Result - 4 out of 5 Stars
There was once a Saturday Night Live skit where Steve Martin and Bill Murray played a pair of cavemen. Martin was the brainy one, Murray the muscle lug. Martin would get Murray to do all the tasks while insisting that they worked best because "You're the strongest, and I'm the smartest!" At the end of the skit, Murray picks up a boulder and crushes Martin with it...proclaiming "Now I'm the strongest AND the smartest."
"Idiocracy" brought that sketch to mind as Joe Bauers (a slacker Luke Wilson) and a Rita, a prostitute played by SNL's Maya Rudolph are thrown 500 years into a future where mad rabbit breeding by trailer-trashers has led to a massive outnumbering of smart people, who held their family growth in check. Ultimately, the only thing left is a populous of monosyllabic mouth breathers who sit on chairs that double as toilets, suck junk food from tubes and have made "Ow My Balls" the highest rated show on TV. Imagine Beavis and Butthead as a live action show, and you've got "Idiocracy."
When Joe and Rita discover that, even as average as they are, they're now the smartest people on the planet, the comedy kicks in. The humor is blacker than black, and it seems more than a little prophetic. In 2006, it's alleged Fox dumped this movie as quickly as they could to perform a contractual obligation to director/writer Mike Judge before throwing it to the DVD market. The story went that Fox wasn't too keen on the vicious anti-consumer message (Fox News in 2500 is being delivered by a naked man and a buxom woman, Starbucks is now a sex parlor and Latte is a euphemism for "hand-job"). But seeing the "town halls" that erupted in 2009, with "common people" on a rampage about birth certificates and death panels makes me wonder if Judge hadn't discovered the "time masheen" in his movie and taken a quickie trip forward. The scene in the hospital where patients are playing slot machines for a chance at health care would be funnier if it didn't seem so much like current affairs.
"Idiocracy" isn't for everyone. The dark humor is more than stabbing, and often cruel. But if you ever worried that Brave New World was going to be more Beavis and Butthead than Star Trek, you should get a look at this timely and nasty satire.
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