So I know people were speculating that 20th Century Fox sat on Mike Judge’s latest movie because it’s anti-corporate and takes a shot at Fox News. Maybe. I don’t know what their motivation might have been.

But I wouldn’t have promoted it either. Because it sucks. It’s a really, really horrible movie. There are a few laughs. But no more than you’d get in a 10-minute span of Beavis and Butthead. Problem is, the movie’s eight times longer than that.

I like Judge. Office Space make me laugh, and King of the Hill is still one of the more consistently interesting shows on television. But Idiocracy was a top-to-bottom failure The dystopia shtick is good for about six laughs. The dialogue is lazy and trite. The narration (yes, much of the plot is narrated) is forced and unwieldy. It’s poorly edited. And Luke Wilson is an absolute nightmare (Maya Rudolph is terrible, too). The whole thing just feels half-assed.

I suppose that could be the point — that Judge made a movie about how pop culture, bad breeding, and corporate dumbing-down are robbing us of taste and sophistication — and will ultimately doom us — then purposefully made the movie as dumb, plotless, and pointless as possible as some sort of meta way of suggesting the process foretold in the film is already underway.

But if that’s the case, doesn’t 20th Century Fox come off looking pretty good for refusing to promote and distribute it? They’re the new guardians of public taste! And Judge’s corporate nemesis of the past couple years in a weird way becomes his philosophical ally.

Of course if all this is true, Judge’s prophecy is far from dead — there were actually people who liked the movie. I can’t help but hope their judgment’s been skewed by blind anti-corporatism, their love of Judge’s prior work, or perhaps they’ve just bought into the subversive romance of finding some gem of a movie that “the studios didn’t want you to see.”

Because if that many people really did like this turd on its own merits, Judge may be on to something.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 8:52 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.