Idiocracy is a film that never actually got a cinema release in the UK. Made by the creator of Beavis & Butthead, as well as King of the Hill, Mike Judge, this film was made after the cult success of Office Space – a film that only really did well on DVD.
Well this time Fox has pretty much forced success to come via DVD since it sat on the film for two years before opening the film without showing it to critics in a paltry six cities in the US. It comes to us straight to DVD here.
Luke Wilson is a very average soldier who’s put into a cryogenics chamber as part of an army experiment. The programme gets shut down and he’s forgotten about for five hundred years. In the meantime, the stupid people have taken over, with evolution taking a downward spiral. It’s into this world that Wilson’s character arrives – where the president is a three-time Smackdown champion, where Starbucks no longer sells coffee in the manner we currently have, and where water has been replaced by a Gatorade type drink (“it’s got electrolytes”).
Basically this is an at times heavy-handed satire on the dumbing down of society. While it’s not the funniest film of the year, and probably isn’t as good as Office Space, it’s a crying shame that something like this doesn’t make it to the cinema while a travesty like Norbit does.