At first, we get Judge’s familiar but endearing potty humor: Beavis and Butt-Head arrive at the Johnson Space Center, and the latter immediately jokes, “Heh, heh. Johnson. Mission control astronauts test docking with the Mir space station, and you guessed it, the phallic imagery of the docking arm and corresponding opening produces sexual sensations in the couple. They spend hours pushing the tube into the metal hole, to the point that astronauts mistake them for scientists and take them into space as a PR puncture (two at-risk youths rescued by NASA!). They agree to go only because an astronaut, Serena Ryan (voiced by Andrea Savage) asks them if they want to “do” it (i.e. dock with Mir).

As usual, the two find themselves in trouble because their excitement causes them to misunderstand the situation as a scoring opportunity, and the adults around them are too distant to understand how foolish they are. This misreading causes the pair to destroy the shuttle and be blasted off into space by Serena where they stumble upon a black hole that sends them into the future, 2022.

While most sequels invite reassurance through the familiar, this film’s finest moment comes through Judge grappling with his signature humor in a modern world. The pair learn what a smartphone is and the purchasing power it holds; in an ode to Spike Jonze’s “Her”, Beavis falls in love with Siri (voiced by Susan Bennett). The two jerks even stumble into a gender studies class (taught by a professor voiced by Tig Notaro) where they mistakenly learn that white privilege is license to do whatever they want (which is ironic because best friends have always done what they wanted). Each piece is more ingenious than the last, allowing for new kinds of laughter in today’s environment. It’s a shame then that Judge gets impatient and forgoes the modern storyline, with a sure tonal return as the pair struggle to return to the 1990s.

It also doesn’t help that the subplots mostly fizzle. Serena, for example, is running for re-election as governor of Texas and fears that Beavis and Butt-Head will reveal how she tried to assassinate them. The government thinks Beavis and Butt-Head are aliens ripe for dissection. And alternate versions of the pair, known as Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head, arrive from another dimension (this storyline makes the sequel another attempt this year at multiverse madness) to bring the two half-minds to go through a portal back to their own time before their presence causes the universe to collapse. While the other subplots spin their wheels into nothingness, this latest one about the different versions of them is reminiscent of “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” which also inserted two reckless pleasure-seekers into a modern landscape.