There was a period when American studio comedies were allowed to be ugly. Their characters could be broke, hungover, badly dressed, mildly criminal, and wrong about nearly everything. They were often built around two or three actors with enough chemistry to make ninety minutes of terrible decision-making feel like forward motion. Macon Blair’s Idiots arrives with the energy of a movie that remembers that era and resents the fact that it ended. It is crude, violent, occasionally disgusting, and far more affectionate toward its losers than the title suggests.
Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. play Mark and Davis, two men whose qualifications for transporting a wealthy teenager to rehab appear to begin and end with their willingness to accept the job. The teenager is Sheridan, played by Mason Thames, and he is not particularly interested in being rehabilitated, transported, or treated like a person with anything to lose. The assignment should be simple. In a Macon Blair film, simplicity is usually an invitation for humiliation.
Blair has always been interested in the way ordinary incompetence brushes up against real danger. As an actor and filmmaker, he emerged from the same scrappy American independent tradition that produced Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin and Green Room, movies where people made panicked decisions with consequences that did not reset at the end of a scene. Idiots applies a much broader comic tone to similar instincts. Guns are dangerous, criminals are dangerous, drugs are dangerous, but the greatest threat remains a person who believes he has finally figured out what to do.
Franco understands that immediately. Mark is not stupid in a blank way. He is stupid with momentum. Every bad idea arrives with the conviction of a breakthrough, and Franco gives him the kind of eager vacancy that lets the audience see disaster several beats before he does. O’Shea Jackson Jr. is the better counterweight than the movie sometimes deserves. Davis has enough common sense to recognize the danger around them, but not enough to leave. Jackson has always been particularly good at playing characters who look exhausted by someone else’s stupidity while continuing to participate in it.
Mason Thames, meanwhile, gets to weaponize the clean-cut leading-man quality that has defined much of his young career. Sheridan is rich, hostile, terminally online, and capable of making the two adults assigned to control him seem almost responsible. The joke works because Thames does not ask to be liked. He plays entitlement with the confidence of someone who has never had to distinguish attention from affection. Kiernan Shipka, Peter Dinklage, Nicholas Braun, and a collection of strange supporting figures drift through the movie, some for extended sequences and others like stations on a particularly cursed road trip.
The result is funny in bursts rather than consistently. Blair has an obvious affection for the gross-out comedy and criminal farce of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and Idiots occasionally feels like a movie that somehow escaped from that period without being cleaned up for contemporary taste. There are bodily fluids, drugs, fights, terrible lies, worse improvisations, and at least one sequence that pushes Franco’s willingness to debase himself to impressive levels. The jokes do not all land, but the movie rarely looks embarrassed by them. That confidence matters.
What is less successful is the film’s attempt to smuggle social commentary into the chaos. Sheridan’s influencer-era narcissism gives Blair an easy target, and there are scattered observations about money, online celebrity, addiction, and the increasingly absurd labor people accept when they are desperate. Yet the movie is sharper about class when it is not talking about class. Mark and Davis moving through expensive homes, rehab systems, criminal spaces, and service jobs tells us more about their position than the lines designed to underline it.
The tonal instability is both the movie’s charm and its weakness. A scene can begin as broad comedy, wander into genuine menace, and then end on something almost tender. Blair likes that instability; it is part of his filmmaking DNA. But in Idiots the transitions occasionally feel less like deliberate discomfort than a movie changing channels. The final act in particular strains to turn escalating stupidity into a satisfying crime plot, when the earlier sections are more enjoyable precisely because the story seems capable of collapsing at any moment.
Still, there is something pleasingly human underneath all the ugliness. Mark and Davis are not secretly brilliant men waiting for the audience to recognize their hidden worth. Blair does not perform the usual comedy trick of revealing that the losers are actually winners according to a more meaningful set of values. They are idiots. They are also loyal, wounded, funny, and occasionally capable of decency. Those qualities are allowed to coexist.
That is why the movie’s best passages are the least complicated ones: three mismatched people in a car, a restaurant, a motel, or some other temporary space, trying to decide what to do next. Franco charges ahead, Jackson reacts, Thames needles both of them, and the film finds a rhythm that feels almost classical. The crime story is secondary. The real engine is the shifting hierarchy of who happens to be the dumbest person in the room.
Idiots is unlikely to become the comedy revival its admirers may want it to be. It is too messy, too inconsistent, and too determined to test the audience’s tolerance for ugliness. But its very existence feels refreshing in a theatrical landscape where mid-budget comedy has become unusually cautious. Blair has made a movie with bad taste and a pulse. Sometimes that is enough to forgive a lot of bad decisions.
