Idiots is billed as a return to the raunchy bro comedies of the 2000s like Pineapple Express and The Hangover and about halfway through there is a visual gag involving bodily functions that is so revolting, so unexpected and so genius that it comes close to them. For a moment, I was transported back to the mix of delight and disgust I felt upon watching a ‘90s Farrelly Brothers movie when I was far too young: How is this allowed? Described as an “earnest-dipshits-on-the-road screwball comedy” by director Macon Blair (I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, The Toxic Avenger), this R-rated indie comedy can’t entirely deliver on that enticingly deranged promise, but it has enough testosterone-fueled transgression to make its runtime breeze by.
Dave Franco plays Mark, a doofus with a neck tattoo who expresses affection for his fellow man by slapping them on the jowls. When he is invited to vacate his job at a call center – which he has been coasting through by playing gory video games and sneaking shots of whiskey at his desk – he teams up with with Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr) for a dodgy under-the-table job involving transporting wayward teens to rehab. Their first charge is Sheridan (Mason Thames), a moody influencer who has made a name for himself by playing cruel stunts on members of the public like an off-brand Jake Paul.
Like Harold & Kumar before it, the road trip is an obvious but effective ruse for Idiots’s freeform, THC-addled approach to storytelling which finds the trio jumping from country diner to crummy motel to a Slavic granny’s living room as Sheridan attempts to derail his passage to rehab. The film has been over a decade in development but it’s hard to resist the leads’ natural-feeling, infectious chemistry. That’s perhaps due to the fact that they have worked together before in various configurations: Jackson and Franco in the short-lived Quibi TV show The Now; Franco and Thames in 2025 weepie Regretting You.
Jackson is particularly memorable as a version of the kind of softhearted hustler he played in Ingrid Goes West, and Kiernan Shipka steals most of her scenes as a badass eastern European stripper who teams up with the gang after they partake in her… services. I am of course referring to a lapdance set to a heavy metal soundtrack where Shipka stares at Franco like she is burning a hole into his soul. The cast’s strength lets Macon’s film get away with some winning stupidity, such as when Davis is reprimanded by his pastor, played by Killer Mike, for taking a church group of kids to see a movie with full frontal shots of “dongs”. (The film turns out to be Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.) Sheridan has some great lines that parody the broken-brained slang of lookmaxxing forums: the character is essentially a Clavicular proxy, sneering “you are beta cuck trash” at one adversary.
There’s space for a little more insight about the psychology of internet clout-chasing than Idiots provides: it has far less to say on this than dark comedies like Quentin Dupieux’s The Piano Accident, or indeed Ingrid Goes West. All the same, it is satisfying to see Sheridan face the consequences of his chosen path to fame as the film turns into an all-out brawl thanks to a run in with a crustpunk gang led by Peter Dinklage as Karl “Koko” Sandoz and Nicholas Braun playing a wannabe rapper with a face tattoo and gold grills. As the stakes intensify, the film grows increasingly muddled, and Idiots begins to feel like it is going round in circles.
I am sure that director Blair didn’t intend a micro distributor like IFC to pick this up – surely it was picturing a wider release comparable to Franco’s Neighbors given its relatively big name actors, puerile humor (complimentary) and the fact that it changed its original title of Shitheads to something more commercially viable – though it should be said, far less memorable. There isn’t much space for laughs at the end as the film struggles to tie up its loose ends. You don’t remember the classic bro comedies for the “I love you man” bear hugs, you remember them for their zany set-pieces and whipsmart dialogue set to become immortalized as broski memes forevermore.
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