Maybe it’s a relief that Judge hasn’t aimed for topical jokes about the current political landscape, which has proved notoriously difficult to satirize these past few years. Do the Universe could use more such culture-clash riffing, and less of the bumbling antics of the Deep State agents tracking Beavis and Butt-Head. At one point, they wander into a college lecture hall, where their usual talk of “sluts” is suddenly received as sex positivity naturally, they take the wrong lesson from the instructor’s crash course on white privilege. The movie’s best scenes exploit the comic possibilities of Beavis and Butt-Head colliding with a supposedly more enlightened present. Befitting its fate as lowly streaming content, Do the Universe is structured more like a binge – though don’t expect any of the priceless Mystery Science Theater 3,000 music-video commentary that proved the invariable highlight of any actual B&B episode. Yet 1996’s Beavis and Butt-Head Do America was a more cinematic affair on the whole part of its cleverness came down to how Judge expanded the storytelling canvas and elevated the animation of his TV comedy while clowning on the expectation that the pair might do anything more big-screen dramatic than get high and laugh at national landmarks.
Navigating time and space is a big leap for these two, whose first movie sent them across the comparably smaller frontier of the United States. What are America’s most clueless teens doing aboard a space shuttle? Blame an altruistic judge and an earnest astronaut (Andrea Savage) who mistakes the boys’ obsession with a phallically suggestive docking procedure for scientific curiosity. Judge, who returns to write, direct and once more voice his most iconically imbecilic characters (yes, that’s still the film-maker supplying Butt-Head’s low, monotonic chortle and Beavis’s higher giggle), borrows a page from another popular pair of high-school Gen X buffoons: like Bill and Ted, Beavis and Butt-Head end up literally traveling through time – in this case, via a black hole they’re sucked into during a Nasa mission they bungle. So why does the film feel like a missed opportunity in the satire department, even as its eponymous slacker idiots score plenty of familiar laughs? America hasn’t gotten any less spoofable in the 30 years since Beavis and Butt-Head made their ignoble small-screen debut there’s no shortage of contemporary targets for Judge to lock in his comedic crosshairs.
The hook of this new feature-length vehicle is that it plucks television’s densest duo out of their natural 90s habitat and deposits them straight into the modern world. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe isn’t much of a window or a mirror.
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