Director: John Rice, Albert Calleros
Cast: Mike Judge, Gary Cole, Nat Faxon, Chi McBride
Have I Seen it Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: The animation may be upgraded—and haltingly at that—past the point where it has any remaining charm from its 90s roots, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t laughing pretty consistently from beginning to end. In a year surprisingly full of multiverse-themed films, it proves to be my second-favorite example, right behind Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) but oddly more satisfying than the perfunctory Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).
The movie is completely self-aware about its position in the universe, quite literally. Pitching itself as the dumbest science fiction movie ever made (it might feel a rivalry with Mike Judge’s other opus, Idiocracy (2006)) and luxuriates in that role. The plot is almost not worth mentioning, but due to the almost instinctual stupidtiy of NASA (the organization and their employees prove dumber than the protagonists) Beavis and Butthead (both voiced by Judge) are flung from the late 90s where we last left them, and into a COVID-less, but no less fraught 2022.
Do B and B have any place in our current era? If we take them on face value—as more than a few parents, including my own—did back in the day, almost certainly not. They are so unrepentantly venal that they make the cast of Seinfeld look like the Missionaries of Charity. And where comedies of the bleak-hearted surely lean on farce, but at his best Judge harnesses societal satire and seamlessly fuses it with the farce. B and B may be grotesquely stupid, but they were forged that way by the time which they came from, and as I type these words I realize that 2022 has been waiting for them to come home this whole time. Could they continue on like this? They’ve gotten this far, who am I to say?