‘Idiocracy’ (movie, 2006)

Watch enough TV, eat enough fast food, drive through enough construction, absorb enough cable news, shop in enough malls, wait on hold for enough hours — sit through enough movies — and you can’t help but suspect that civilization is getting dumber and dumber. Directed by Mike Judge, whose King of the Hill is one of my all-time favorite TV shows, Idiocracy extends this premise five hundred years into the future. Luke Wilson stars as an Army guinea pig who wakes up in the year 2505 and finds himself in a society so stupid and crude that it seems even worse than our own.

It’s a very funny premise, but there’s an obvious problem with setting a movie in the dumbest of all possible worlds, and nothing is done to solve it in this one. Idiocracy unfolds as one incredibly dumb movie. Oh, there are a couple of weak laughs, but it’s mostly just bang-your-head-into-the-wall dumb and exhausting, even at only 84 minutes. It co-stars Maya Rudolph which, in retrospect, should have been warning enough.

Over at Netflix, on their scale of one to five, I rated Idiocracy a one-star waste of time.