Idiocracy - DVD Review

Idiocracy is the latest movie by Mike Judge, the man that brought us such greats as Office Space and King of the Hill. Given that sentence you would think that this was going to be a good review… but you’d be wrong. This was one of the worst movies I’ve had the displeasure to see in my lifetime! Now that may sound a bit strong but I swear to you its the truth. The oddball thing is that I saw so many great reviews of this movie on how it was “a witty commentary on American culture” or “so controversial that Fox purposely sandbagged it at the theaters”. That meant to me that this was a movie worth seeing no matter how silly the story seemed to be upon reading the back of the DVD cover. I should have listened to my wife and not rented it but I kept telling her “It got great reviews… and it is my Mike Judge after all.” Unfortunately she let her love of Office Space cloud her mind (much like I did) and she gave in. Allow me to use this time to apologize to her for making her watch it with me: I’m sorry babe, you were right.

Back to the review, the basic premise of the movie is the future of the world is run by idiots (hence the title) due to most of the breeding among humans is done by the lowest members of our society. As a result, the world has went to hell and no one is smart enough to fix things. Its at this point that the movie really takes a turn for the worse and asks you to believe that Luke Wilson is now the smartest man on Earth and must save humanity. That said, I’m all for “suspension of disbelief” in films since our enjoyment of them requires it most of the time but this is just asking too much of people to believe this… please. The rest of the movie is basically him trying to save the world and, as they say, hilarity ensues (or in the case, boredom ensues).

Overall this movie was horrible in more ways than I can count and I definitely believe now that Fox did in fact sandbag this movie… but because it was so bad, not because it was so controversial. If I were Fox I would want people to know I produced this shit either! And the worst part of this whole thing is it will surely leave some people with a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to Mike Judge movies. So if this is the first of his films you’ve seen please take the time to watch Office Space sometime soon so you can see some of his better work. For that matter, I’d recommend you watch his Beavis and Butt-Head Do America movie before you take the time to watch Idiocracy… at least that movie was funny!