Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe” is only the second Beavis and Butt-Head movie — after “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America,” which came out (are you ready to feel old?) in 1996.
That’s a long time to put a franchise about the world’s dumbest, horniest, and most meta teenage metal-heads on hold. But I’m not sure that the world was clamoring for another Beavis and Butt-Head movie, and this one isn’t exactly the “Top Gun: Maverick” of B & B-Head sequels.
It is, however, a shaggy, snark-infused lark that’s likable enough to get by. The first movie, amusing as some of it was, never found the cultural foothold that “South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut” did, and the reason is that Beavis and Butt-Head were most at home on their MTV series, a form that mirrored their fractured attention spans — and that allowed them, of course, to critique music videos, which lent the series a stupido-smart “Mystery Science Theater” element that was generally my favorite part of each episode. “Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe” is a time-tripping sci-fi burlesque that features the Space Shuttle Endeavour and wormholes and a multiverse.
But for all the tongue-in-butt-cheek quantum gamesmanship on display, it’s really a time machine of nostalgia, one that finds Beavis and Butt-Head very much their old familiar blitzed and big-haired metal-T-shirted selves, still unable to see what’s right in front of them after all these years.
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