Comedy. “Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe.” starring Chi McBride, Gary Cole, Nat Faxon, Mike Judge, Tig Notaro, and Stephen Root. Mike Judge is the director. 86 minutes on TV-14. premieres on Paramount+ on Thursday, June 23.
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Beavis and Butt-Head: The Movie [Paramount Plus] – Review
MTV first exposed us to a pair of incredibly stupid, uncaring kids in 1993 who were content to cause mayhem and watch MTV.
For everyone else sat in front of the TV watching music videos, “Beavis and Butt-Head” served as a funhouse mirror.
Mike Judge, the creator of the series, appeared to be saying, “This is you.”
Judge, a study of stupidity—this is the man who predicted the current political climate in “Idiocracy”—somehow managed to make his intended audience laugh at themselves.
In this day and age, you might assume the guys would feel right at home.
Beavis and Butt-Head were incels before the term was even coined, involuntary celibates who fervently wanted to score with the ladies.
American culture still suffers from a severe case of the stupids.
This is actually the main plot of the recently released film “Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe,” a horribly drawn-out romp through prison, college, time travel, space travel, and, of course, Texas, Judge’s inspiration for the setting and culture (he cut his animation teeth in the Dallas suburb of Richardson).
Beavis and Butthead are still desperate to score in 1998. The boys think their sexual spacecraft has arrived after a mix-up with a female astronaut at space camp (don’t ask).
This leads to a stream of double entendres, some of which are actually quite humorous.
Instead, they end up in space with a group of egotistical astronauts, where they wreck havoc before falling into a black hole and ending up in the year 2022, where there are things like cell phones and such.
It turns out that the former astronaut is currently vying for re-election as governor of Texas.
And the fact that her image appears on so many billboards suggests that she is still interested.
“Beavis and Butt-Head” never excelled in plotting, but that was okay as long as their antics were broken up into music videos.
(Starting on June 23, Paramount+ will also stream remastered copies of the original TV episodes with the videos unaltered.)
“Beavis and Butt-Head Do America,” a previous feature film, kept things straightforward: someone stole B&B’s TV, and their quest to recover it leads to some ripe travelogue social commentary.
However, it’s often not a good idea to outline a complete tale for these characters.
“Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe” clocks in at 86 minutes, but it seems twice as long.
The majority of the funny parts are in the premise and come about every 15 to 20 minutes, which isn’t quite the ideal Mel Brooks ratio.
Beavis and Butt-Head are ignorant and horny, but that isn’t enough to support jokes for an entire film.
Not everything is lost, though. Again, don’t ask. Our heroes wander into a gender studies class at a university and are lectured on white privilege: You think you can get away with anything, the police won’t bother you, etc.
Due of their nature, Beavis and Butt-Head view this as positive. They leave the classroom, engage in a spree of theft, steal a police car, and all the while claim that they are entitled to everything because, you know, they are white.
It’s one of those rare instances in a movie that blurs the distinction between making fun of stupidity and actually being foolish when the sensibility of “Beavis and Butt-Head” works wonderfully in the present.
