If only Idiots had been able to keep its original title, "The Shitheads". Not only is it a far funnier and eye-catching title, but it is also a pretty perfect description of the type of lovable losers, complete disasters, and genuinely terrible people that populate Macon Blair’s raucous new comedy. Thankfully, the title may have changed, but the movie itself remains every bit as gleefully crude as that original name suggests.
Written and directed by Blair (The Toxic Avenger, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore), Idiots follows Mark (Dave Franco) and Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), two screw-ups of very different varieties who somehow find themselves working a niche job together - transporting troubled teenagers to and from rehab. Davis is an earnest, God-fearing good guy who genuinely has his heart in the right place, while Mark is far more lackadaisical about the whole thing. He has a drug habit of his own that certainly doesn’t help his professionalism. The contrast is established beautifully through their costumes alone: Davis is dressed in a tucked-in button-up and tie, desperate to look like he has his life together, while Mark looks like he just wandered into work after sleeping off a three-week bender.
As one can guess, their first assignment together goes terribly wrong in a comedy of errors. The pair are tasked with transporting Sheridan Kimberley (Mason Thames), an extremely wealthy and conniving young man whose first words upon being collected are a cheeky and manipulative, “What if I killed myself?” From there, things only get worse. Sheridan is an unpredictable little shithead who can switch from sympathetic to threatening in the blink of an eye, and Thames (Nimrods, The Black Phone) clearly understands exactly how much fun there is to be had with a character who is smarter than everyone around him and knows it.
Idiots is essentially a mismatched buddy road movie full of bickering, bad decisions, drug trips, and of course, eventual run-ins with dangerous gangsters to up the stakes. Sheridan’s entitlement extends to believing that everything and everyone is something he can purchase, manipulate, or control, which becomes particularly problematic when a plucky stripper named Irina (Kiernan Shipka) enters the picture.
What begins as another opportunity for the movie to indulge its ridiculousness takes a nasty turn when Sheridan seriously oversteps - but rest assured that while Blair gives moments like these the proper weight, the film doesn’t lose sight of its humorous core. True to his stylings, Blair isn’t afraid to push his characters into situations that would be unbearable in a more restrained comedy, and there’s something refreshing about how little interest he has in pulling his punches; whether it has to do with blood or even nastier things.
Before long, Sheridan gives his captors the slip and robs everyone involved to boot, forcing Mark, Davis, Irina, and even the young woman’s grandmother into an unlikely team-up to track the billionaire psychopath down and send him away to rehab once and for all - no matter the cost.
It's here where Idiots starts to reveal more of what it’s actually saying beneath all the dick jokes and drug trips. At one point in their journey, an irritated Irina tells Mark that he is “more like Sheridan than he thinks,” and while the movie arguably makes the comparison a little too explicit, the observation is an important one. Mark and Sheridan are both selfish, impulsive people who are constantly looking for the easiest way to get what they want. The difference is largely circumstance. If Sheridan were poor, or Mark were rich, their lives might look remarkably similar.
The same idea extends to the immaculately named Pricka Bush Da Werewoof (Nicholas Braun), a wannabe rap star who, alongside Peter Dinklage’s wonderfully bizarre gangster character Koko, provides some of the movie’s biggest comedic highlights. Both characters are perfect examples of the stupidly hilarious energy that makes Idiots so much fun more often that not.
There is a point around the halfway mark, however, where that energy begins to work against the movie. The additional characters and increasingly absurd situations are rarely bad additions, but the pacing does start to meander whenever the story attempts to inject something a little deeper. Idiots feels like it could have been an absolutely killer 90-minute or less stoner road comedy, but as it stands, it occasionally struggles to keep the party going. The movie is at its best when it’s simply throwing one insane situation after another at Mark and Davis, and some of the more conventional plot and character developments slow that momentum down.
Still, there’s enough personality here to overcome those bumps. Franco (Now You See Me, Together) and Jackson (Cocaine Bear, Den of Thieves) make for an excellent mismatched comedy duo, with Jackson in particular getting the opportunity to show off a much more emotional and earnest side of his acting talents than he’s previously been allowed. Thames is an absolute menace as Sheridan, continuing to earn his young stardom by perfectly balancing the character’s cunning charm with the increasingly obvious danger underneath it.
Idiots doesn’t quite coalesce into something truly essential or consistently hilarious, but it also doesn’t really need to. This is an exceptionally entertaining vehicle for some very obvious ideas, elevated by a committed cast and a willingness to take its comedy into some wonderfully dark and ridiculous places. It may not be perfect, but there are plenty of reasons to hang out with these particular idiots for an hour or two.
‘Idiots’ hits theaters August 28th.
