Mike Judge has always had a soft spot for dimwits. Beavis and Butt-head might leave chaos and destruction in their muttering, giggling wake, but they rarely suffer lasting harm themselves. In another writer’s hands, the soft-handed seat-fillers of his slacker masterpiece “Office Space” would be contemptible. Judge makes their complete and utter failure to pull off a microscopic scam feel heroic. For “King of the Hill,” he built an entire town out of workaholic marks and conspiratorial morons, and never once sneered at them across 13 seasons. So, you have to wonder, what happened in 2006? What happened with “Idiocracy?”
Judge’s sci-fi comedy, which turns 20 this month, centers around an Army librarian named Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) who unwittingly time travels into a dumbed-down future. The rabble living in this grim, garbage-strewn dystopia are kept docile by a steady stream of imbecilic television and sugary drinks. Any citizen who steps out of line risks the ire of an even dumber police force, riding around in cruisers that lift their design language from Ed Hardy clothing. After being arrested and sent to debtor’s prison, Bauers’ intellect attracts the attention of the pro wrestler president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews), who reveals that the country is suffering through a crop failure. It falls to Wilson’s exceedingly average Joe to save a world too stupid to save itself.
