‘Idiots’ review: Dave Franco gets wild in an uneven comedy of escalating chaos
- Nate Adams
- 8 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Courtesy of IFC
There’s certainly a lot to admire in writer-director Macon Blair’s road-trip indie “Idiots,” formally titled “The Shitheads” when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Its plot takes some genuinely crazy turns, Nicolas Braun shows up sporting grillz as part of a ridiculous rap alter ego, and Dave Franco gets to indulge in the kind of well-supplied drug addict role that isn’t far removed from the one his brother played in “Pineapple Express.” Blair has also assembled a good cast around him, including O’Shea Jackson Jr. and the seemingly omnipresent Mason Thames, while Peter Dinklage pops up in a fun supporting role as a dopey, Dollar General-level mercenary whose inclusion in the plot requires a whole lot of disbelief.
That’s ultimately where the problem lies with “Idiots.” Blair takes so many twists, turns and audacious swings, at one point practically switching genres altogether, that the movie gradually becomes detached from the relatively simple road-trip comedy where it started. Absurdity is obviously part of the appeal, and Blair isn’t exactly striving for realism, but the escalation becomes so relentless that it’s difficult to understand how one development is supposed to connect to the next beyond the movie’s desire to keep getting crazier. Thankfully, the three leads maintain an earnest and easygoing chemistry through all of it, with Franco doing most of the heavy lifting as he funnels through just about every emotion imaginable while indulging Mark’s drug habit to increasingly explosive results.
Franco, Jackson and Thames play a trio of dimwitted fuck-ups who find themselves stumbling from one absurd situation into another. Jackson plays Davis, who tries to take criticism on the chin even though his inability to recognize why taking a group of Sunday school children to a pornographic movie was a bad idea gives plenty of credence to the movie’s title. Franco is Mark, the proverbial stoner of the trio who could not care less about the direction of his life or how he gets from one day to the next.
Mark and Davis show up for a transportation gig working for a rehab facility for troubled teenagers, driving clients across the state as arranged by their parents. It’s a massive responsibility that somehow gives these two dipshits temporary custody over another human being. That human being is Sheridan (Thames, putting his shit-eating grin to excellent use), a spoiled rich kid routinely in trouble at school and with the law who is being shipped off to rehab with only Mark and Davis standing between him and his destination.
As the trip progresses, we learn that Sheridan is also something of a misogynistic and violent psychopath with a knack for committing a wide array of atrocities and turning them into content. In doing so, he has amassed an online following of more than a million people, which might be among the movie’s more plausible ideas in an era where manosphere personalities can leverage being colossal douchebags into views, followers and influence. There’s something potentially interesting in Blair’s decision to make Sheridan both a product and beneficiary of that culture, especially because his online popularity only reinforces his belief that there are no meaningful consequences for his behavior.
He wreaks all kinds of havoc on Davis and Mark, with the latter proving especially easy to manipulate and bend to his will. Eventually, the invitation of a sex worker (Kiernan Shipka) paves the way for probably the film’s best set piece, sending “Idiots” into a wildly debaucherous stretch that gives Franco some of his funniest material. The problem is that the movie keeps introducing increasingly complicated dimensions to Sheridan without ever really coming to terms with them. His behavior is funny until it isn’t, and Blair never quite figures out how to reconcile the character’s obvious need for serious intervention with a movie that mostly wants to treat everything around him as another opportunity for escalating chaos.
There are still plenty of laughs along the way, and Franco delivers most of the biggest ones. A sequence involving an injured ankle and Mark’s increasingly desperate inability to control his bowel movements are highlights, largely because Franco commits to every humiliation with the same manic sincerity. Jackson is a sturdy straight man beside him, and Thames clearly understands exactly how obnoxious Sheridan needs to be without losing the strange charisma that explains why Mark keeps falling under his influence.
But “Idiots” is ultimately too easygoing about its own chaos to wrestle with the more complicated ideas lurking underneath it. Sheridan’s behavior, his enormous online following, his relationship with his parents and the question of whether he needs rehabilitation or outright hospitalization all give Blair avenues into something sharper about masculinity, social media and the ways destructive behavior can be rewarded with attention. The movie acknowledges those ideas without digging particularly deeply into any of them, preferring to pile another absurd complication onto the road trip whenever things threaten to become serious.
Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, which is half the battle in a comedy this deliberately stupid, and there are enough inspired detours to suggest a much sharper version of “Idiots” hiding somewhere inside the mess. But you still need a script capable of holding all that insanity together. In that regard, “Idiots” lives up to its title a little too well, frequently amusing in the moment but rarely smart enough about its own stupidity to make the whole journey worthwhile.
Grade: C
IDIOTS is now playing in theaters.
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