Gratuitous Llama Netflix Movie Reviews

Idiocracy (2006).

Contrary to my expectation of the other day, it looks like this is the only movie I'll have had time for this weekend. Had I known what was in store, I might have reconsidered my choice.

The plot is this: A low-level slacker from the present time gets involved in an army experiment that causes him to be frozen in suspended animation for 500 years. In the meantime, the world's collective intelligence nose-dives. When the guy wakes up, it turns out he's smarter than anybody else. Hy-larity ensues as the locals first mock him for not being dumberer and then try to use his superior intellect to solve all their problems (most of which involve Gatorade).

Basically, we're talking Buck Rodgers meets Beavis & Butthead (which makes sense, as the flick was made by Mike Judge).

Well.....I liked the premise. And the explanation of how Mankind's evolutionary path transmogrified from survival-of-the-fittest natural selection to lowest-common-denominator drool-fest was quite funny. But from there, the movie simply fell flat. There really wasn't anything one could call character development, the plot was listless and hokey and the endlessly repetitve "We be dumb" jokes got pretty old, pretty fast.

All in all, I'd give it about 1.5 orgles out of 5, and that's only because of the evolutionary bit towards the beginning.

Incidentally, Maya Rudolph was the female lead. (She plays a street-smart prostitute who gets sent into the future in the same experiment as nice-guy slacker Luke Wilson.) I bring this up only because I happened to catch a few minutes of Saturday Night Live last evening when we got home. I haven't seen the show in years and years. This is what passes for funny these days? Yeesh. I'd say Idiocracy may be more prophetic than we might realize.