In the Land of the Stupid

In the realm of comedies, there are few failure bigger than Mike Judge's Idiocracy. That's not a reflection on the movie itself (although we do have things to discuss on that front), just that when the film was released in theaters, it absolutely failed to make back its money, and then some. Bear in mind that the movie was made for a tiny budget of $2.4 Mil. That's couch cash in Hollywood money, and yet even then it didn't even break $500k at the Box Office. There are financial failures and then there's Idiocracy.

So what went wrong? In fairness to the studio, they knew that creator Mike Judge's last film, Office Space, hadn't been a rip-roaring success either. That film had made $12 Mil against a $10 Mil budget, and while it found legs on home video, eventually becoming a cult classic, it's theatrical run was a disaster. So for his next big effort they scaled back, by a lot. Perhaps part of the problem was that the film looked cheap and didn't really feature many stars (at least, not stars at the time). Certainly, for a high concept sci-fi film, which this basically is, the film doesn't look it. It looks like literal garbage, which is kind of its aesthetic.

Honestly, though, I think the big issue is that the film really doesn't have an audience in mind. It has a story that it approaches with smug superiority, but it hits its humor at the lowest, most basic level. And it's targets are basically everyone. It hates smart people, but it hates dumb people too, and it's pretty obvious about who (along the political and socio-economic spectrum) it thinks are the smarties and the idiots. It goes at its subject with a big, dumb, shotgun blast, barely leaving a mark on anything, all to tell its smug and superior little story. It just... doesn't really work.

The story is about Corporal Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), the so-called "most average guy in the military". He's chosen, due to his averageness (and because no one will miss him) to be part of an Army experiment in cryogenics. He and one woman, prostitute Rita (Maya Rudolph) would be frozen for one year to, thus, prove that the experiment worked. If it did, the military's best and brightest could be frozen until needed for any war that would come up. Except, after getting frozen, the head of the project is arrested and thrown in jail and the freezing project is forgotten.

Cut to 500 years later when Joe and Rita are accidentally awoken. Joe finds himself in a world filled with idiots since (as the film bluntly puts it) the smart people failed to breed at all while the big, dumb, redneck idiots did nothing but. Evolution and natural selection took over and now the world is populated by the dumbest shit-bricks to ever walk the Earth. And, wow, have they really made a mess of it. Crops are dead, waste is everywhere, and nothing works at all. Society is on the verge of collapse, and there's only one guy that can save everything: the most average guy ever, who is now the smartest man still alive.

As a comedy, Idiocracy really isn't all that funny. It has a few obvious jokes, and it beats those to death. The rest of the time it expects us to laugh at the situation, a world populated by idiots, because apparently that's funny on its own. And it is funny, for a few brief moments, but then the scenario just goes on and on without end. It's like a Saturday Night Live sketch -- "what if the world was populated by nothing but idiots?" -- dragged out to feature length without any additional ideas thrown in.

Making things worse is that Luke Wilson really isn't the kind of comedic actor you want for this film. Don't get me wrong, I like the actor in many of the things he's been in (like Legally Blonde and Old School), but he's much better when he has people he can react to. He needs a strong comedic partner to play off of so he can add his cool, detached vibe to the scene. Here, though, he has to carry the film, not just reacting to the world but also playing the straightest of straight men and he just can't make it work.

Frankly, the film needed to pair him up with Maya Rudolph more. Her character has a ridiculous setup, mind you, playing a hooker that is, for some reason, tapped to be in the project. The film strains to explain this, and it isn't funny, but Rudolph does what she can with an underwritten role. When she and Wilson get to share screen time, the film actually finds some energy, but those moments are fleeting. Had the film been structured to pair these two up together, with Rudolph doesn't the obvious comedic heavy lifting, it might have been able to mine more comedy from its scenario.

The biggest issue, though, is that the film is just so mean spirited. It's big joke is, "Middle America is stupid and they're going to out breed the rest of us." And then it makes fun of its idiot characters again and again. There's no letting them be in on the joke, no finding humor from the situation in a way that doesn't mock all the characters around Joe and Rita. They're dumb, and the humor comes from them being dumb. That's all the film really has to say about that.

About the only time the film doesn't feel mean spirited is when its mocking corporate sponsorships. There are a lot of jokes aimed at Carl's, Jr., and I have to assume this was because the fast food joint paid to be in the film. The other product mentioned regularly is Brawndo, a Gatorade-like drink made up for the film, with the slogan of "it's what bodies crave" (or "it's what plants crave," in certain instances). There's actually some pretty biting humor about corporate greed in and around the Brawndo references, and these play. But they're also fleeting and the film quickly drops the corporate greed angle to mock the stupid people once more.

The thing is that as a commentary about the state of the world, Idiocracy almost works. It's a cautionary tale, in a sense, about what could happen we let the idiotic traits of humanity take over. It extrapolates out the ideas of reality TV and corporate greed and almost manages to find a way to be scathing about it, to warn us that we need to change. But it's also stupid and simple and mean and never really finds the proper footing to share its political message properly. It tries to work, but it doesn't really try hard enough, and thus it fails to deliver.

I want to like this film. I really want it to be funny. But, honestly, I was bored while watching it again. It's a slightly amusing idea that even at 84 minutes feels like it goes on way too long. The studio was right to not spend much money on this mean little film, but even then they spent too much. This film wasn't good enough to be a hit, no matter what its cult status might say.