Metacritic reviews

If you were a fan of Beavis and Butt-Head, you will love them doing The Universe. They haven’t changed a bit, even though the world around them has changed. It is delightfully charming and ridiculous and completely expected, in the best way possible.

Beavis And Butt-head Do The Universe is pretty much what you expect—and it’s, uhhhhh, pretty cool.

Paramount+ should have thrown this movie a theatrical run; it may more or less amount to an 86-minute pilot episode for the new series that’s coming soon, but it’s also one of the funniest movies of the year.

It's been 26 years, but Judge hasn't missed a beat. The movie pokes fun at the ridiculousness of our modern world without ever making overt political statements or heavily referencing pop culture, making it a refreshing little escape from our own real-world stupidity.

A legacy sequel that does nothing to revitalize its characters, expand its canon, extend (heh) its mythos, or even really tell a new joke. I laughed through the whole thing.

It’s frequently funny and occasionally savage in its commentary on the changed terrain. But in proving that Beavis and Butt-Head absolutely have a place in the contemporary world, it suggests that there’s a limit to how deeply we probably want to interrogate that place.

Good cartoon characters tend to be ageless, and Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is just clever enough not to feel like an anachronism. The duo’s creator and forever naughty guiding light, the writer-director Mike Judge (who also does their voices), flows the characters into the present day without a hitch in style or a stitch in time.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe doesn’t fully capitalize on a wealth of possible plots, send-ups, and diversions, but it makes a case for the dynamically dumb duo to return for still more inane wackiness (hehehehe, “wack”).

Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe maintains and respects the legacy of the classic MTV show. It hits all the same beats, delivers what people will be looking for, and smoothly weaves in social and cultural references from the 90s and today without feeling ham-fisted or forced. It’s hard to say whether this feature will win them any new fans because, as enjoyable as it is, it’s not their finest hour (and 40 minutes).

Thankfully, the time away hasn’t diminished the smart-dumb comedic value of their personas; watching this latest revival, fans will probably match them chuckle for chuckle. A better sequel, though, might have found more meaningful tension between these timelessly dumb kids and the ongoing dumbing down of the America they’ve been thrust into. Heh heh, we said thrust.