Luke Wilson, so good at looking vaguely put out (you'd think he was British), is a soldier accidentally frozen for 500 years in an army experiment; he wakes up in a future where there are no smart people anymore—imagine a world where Beavis and Butt-Head have taken over. That's the premise behind Mike Judge's long-awaited follow-up to his overpraised but entertaining Office Space. There's about 15 minutes' worth of laughs here; the problem is that the film is 84 minutes long. Since there's no real insight or new ideas to fill up the rest of the time, that makes it about 69 minutes too long, 69 minutes to feel superior by laughing at the poor and the uneducated. Now, that sentence would probably provoke laughter in the characters that populate Judge's version of the year 2505 ("he said 69—twice!"), and then Judge would replay it in slightly different variations for at least 10 minutes. I think perhaps Judge would argue that he's lulling us into questioning our own assumptions about the poor, or something, but a fellow moviegoer put it best when he said that after awhile, a bad satire becomes what it's satirizing. Thus, this is a film about how funny it is to watch someone get kicked in the crotch; on a more "meta" level, it's a film about how funny it is to watch someone watching someone get kicked in the crotch.

—September 17, 2006