‘IDIOTS’ Is an Anarchic Dumb Comedy Cruising On Dave Franco’s Mania

Originally titled The Shitheads when it debuted at Sundance, writer-director-producer Macon Blair’s Idiots is an anti-buddy road-trip comedy about two losers who stumble into gig work transporting an obscenely wealthy, deeply troubled teenager to rehab. Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) has just been fired from his teaching job at a Catholic school after screening Lars von Trier’s Antichrist for his students, who memorably report seeing “the dong going in.” Davis rebukes its X-rating, chalking the real pornographic nature of the scene up to good editing. Mark (Dave Franco), meanwhile, loses his anonymous cubicle job because he spends his workday vaping and watching YouTube and eating snacks instead of, you know, working. “It’s not fair,” he insists. These are the idiots. Or – more appropriately – the shitheads.

Their passenger, Sheridan (Mason Thames), is the biggest shithead of all. A demonic nepo baby with few discernible redeeming qualities beyond his follower count, he’s being shuffled off to rehab as part of an arrangement to keep him out of jail after setting a homeless man on fire. The setup promises an increasingly deranged cross-state odyssey, three combustible personalities stuffed inside a rinky-dink car and sent hurtling through a series of bad decisions. Except Idiots never really takes full advantage of the road-trip part. Despite being 100 minutes, it feels rather small in scope. The pickup happens, everyone lands at a motel for a stretch, Sheridan runs away, and that’s about that. The journey, one could say, spends an awful lot of time in park.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Together‘ directed by Michael Shanks and starring Dave Franco]

That’s frustrating because Blair has assembled a cast perfectly suited to this kind of degeneracy. Franco is funniest when allowed to go completely unhinged, and Mark gives him plenty of room to tap into that manic, Jesse Pinkman-adjacent on even more drugs energy. Jackson Jr. works nicely as the comparatively straight man, but Davis is more of just a lunk with catastrophic decision-making choices than a real point and laugh at him moron. The two bounce off each other well enough, even if their pairing isn’t exactly the birth of the next great comedy duo. Kiernan Shipka turns up as a Russian stripper and, somewhat improbably, becomes one of the movie’s few genuinely sensitive human beings. But she just doesn’t end up having too much to do and remains but a pitstop.

The MVP – brief though his time may be – is Nicholas Braun (Succession‘s beloved duffus Greg) as Werewolf, a twisted-haired criminal and aspiring rapper sporting razor-sharp grills and seemingly too many mental illnesses to count. Hoult barrels into the movie like he escaped from a nastier, insane aslyum version of Idiots, supplying the manic danger and shaky ground Blair’s comedy could use more of. Sadly, he isn’t in the movie enough.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Black Phone 2‘ directed by Scott Derickson and starring Mason Thames]

Sheridan never quite gets the obligatory “maybe this rich little monster is actually misunderstood” makeover either, which is maybe for the best. He eventually reveals himself to be a dumb kid wildly out of his depth, but he’s still fundamentally a scumbag who has spent his life (and likely his entire future) insulated from consequences. The movie doesn’t make much of an effort to absolve him, nor should it. If there’s any broad takeaway here it’s that the rich and powerful are inoculated from their bad decisions and it’s people lower down the totem pole who ultimately pay for their sins.

Idiots is funny throughout but rarely very funny, with most of the biggest laughs coming courtesy of Franco. It’s got enough screechy manic energy to paper over how little actually road exists in this road movie, eventually settling into a story about a couple of schmucks trying, however briefly, to become slightly less schmucky and actually finish the job they were paid to do. There’s enough here for a good time – and this would probably work best with some bro friends and a case of beers – but there’s not quite enough incident, escalation, or truly deranged comic inspiration to drive this to a must see. Idiots gets plenty stupid and crazy. It could have afforded to get a whole lot stupider and crazier.

CONCLUSION: Macon Blair’s ‘Idiots’ is a shaggy road-trip comedy about two shitheads driving another shithead to rehab. The performances, mainly Dave Franco’s, drive the piece toward comedic highs, but it feels too underwritten throughout to be much more than a serviceable but ultimately forgettable laugh vehicle.

B-

For more reviews, interviews, and featured articles, be sure to:

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Letterboxd
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook 
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter
Follow Silver Screen Riot on BlueSky
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Substack