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Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge's 1999 live-action feature film, Office Space, tanked at the box office but quickly built a following on video and DVD, earning cult-classic status and whetting his audience's appetite for more feature films. Still, the studio shelved this long-awaited follow-up -- a futuristic satire depicting a hilariously dumbed-down America -- for over a year before slipping it out for a brief, unpublicized theatrical run. Despite the studio's lack of confidence, fans have nothing to worry about -- Idiocracy delivers the goods. It begins in the present with career serviceman Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), an essentially lazy guy biding his time in uniform for the pension to come, being chosen as a guinea pig for an army experiment in cryogenics. Frozen along with a hooker named Rita (Maya Rudolph), Joe is forgotten in the aftermath of a base shutdown and thawed out some 500 years later. By this time, American society has devolved so precipitously that he and Rita are the smartest people in the country. Think of it as Planet of the Butt-heads. Most of the laughs, and there are many, derive from Judge's extrapolations of current social trends: In this Brave New World, the crops are watered with energy drink ("It has the electrolytes plants crave!"); lawyers attain their degrees from Costco; the president is a wrestling champ; and the most popular TV show is Ow! My Balls! In its way, Idiocracy equals in foreboding the widely hailed documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Only it does so with a smile. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

Mike Judge wrote and directed this offbeat sci-fi comedy which gives a new meaning to the expression "people are getting dumber all the time." In 2005, Pvt. Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) is a soldier chosen to take part in a secret military scientific experiment in which he will be put into induced hibernation for one year, along with a woman named Rita (Maya Rudolph). Bowers is chosen for the assignment because he is statistically the most average man in the Army, while Rita is a hooker ordered to do some community service; however, Bowers and Rita are forgotten when the military base where the experiment took place is closed down, and when they wake up in the year 2505, Bowers finds himself living in a society where intelligence has taken such a landslide he's now the smartest man in the world. Can Bowers save America from its own remarkable stupidity, and he can he get the dunderheads around him to believe what he says? Produced under the title 3001, Idiocracy also stars Dax Shepard as Bowers's numb-skull lawyer, Stephen Root as a judge, and Terry Crews as Camacho, a former porn star and professional wrestler who is now president of the United States. Mark Deming

Product Details

• UPC: 024543401797
• Source: 20TH CENTURY FOX
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: Dolby AC-3 Surround Sound
• Editions: Subtitled, Dubbed
• Time: 1:27:00
• Sales Rank: 3,025

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