‘Idiots’ Review: Dave Franco Is Never Better Than When He’s This Stupid

Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Mason Thames turn a rehab road trip into a filthy, surprisingly poignant comedy.

Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Mason Thames turn a disastrous drive to rehab into a filthy, deceptively intelligent comedy about failure, privilege and the grace we extend to people who keep screwing up. Idiots returns again and again to one throwaway line: “Everyone’s just doing their best.” Dave Franco’s Mark says it like a man who should probably think before he speaks. By the time Macon Blair’s comedy reaches the end of its increasingly disastrous road trip, the line has become something much more sincere.

I first saw Idiots at Sundance, when Blair’s film was still carrying the considerably less marketable title The Shitheads. I really enjoyed it then. Seeing it again months later, without the electricity of a Sundance audience around it, made me realize I had underestimated how much intelligence Blair has buried underneath the stupidity.

Because Idiots is extremely stupid. Proudly so. It is filled with drugs, terrible decisions, criminal detours, bodily functions and people attempting to solve problems they are intellectually unqualified to address. Yet Blair has constructed all of that around a surprisingly humane idea: maybe everyone really is doing their best, even when their best is objectively terrible.

O’Shea Jackson Jr. plays Davis, whose latest professional disaster leaves him scrambling for money. Dave Franco’s Mark is operating under an even looser definition of adulthood. Through circumstances that already suggest nobody involved has performed sufficient due diligence, the two are hired to transport Sheridan Foxworth Kimberly (Mason Thames), an extraordinarily wealthy and extraordinarily awful teenager, to a rehabilitation facility.

The premise is simple enough to support an old-fashioned road comedy. What makes Idiots more interesting is the way Blair gradually turns the three men into different expressions of the same problem. Davis makes bad choices and understands them slightly too late. Mark makes bad choices with the enthusiasm of someone who believes confidence is a substitute for judgment. Sheridan makes them because he has spent his life surrounded by enough money to ensure the consequences become someone else’s responsibility.

That distinction gives the film its surprisingly sharp class commentary. Sheridan can afford to remain an idiot. Davis and Mark cannot.

The movie never turns that observation into a speech, which is precisely why it works. Sheridan’s family can throw money at another institution, another solution and another person tasked with cleaning up the latest mess. Davis and Mark are living much closer to the edge, where losing a job or making one catastrophic decision can actually alter the trajectory of a life.

Everyone may be doing their best. The American economy simply prices everyone’s worst very differently.

Blair keeps that intelligence buried beneath a comic style that is shaggy, deadpan and frequently disgusting. Idiots has the looseness of a hangout movie but the forward momentum of a road movie. There is also an increasingly desperate, after-hours quality as the characters drift farther from the simple assignment they were supposedly completing and deeper into a world of motels, drugs, strangers and escalating danger.

That mixture makes the film hard to compare cleanly with anything else. There are moments with the aimless pleasure of Dazed and Confused, although these characters are older and considerably more desperate. Other stretches have the sleepless urban anxiety of something like Bringing Out the Dead, except the person riding shotgun is a wealthy teenage sociopath who seems determined to make everybody’s night worse.

Mason Thames is terrific at being that problem.

Sheridan could have become unbearable very quickly. Thames instead plays his entitlement with enough precision to make the character funny without softening how awful he can be. He carries himself like someone who has rarely encountered a consequence that could not be transferred to an adult, an employee or a credit card.

It is also important that Blair does not force Sheridan through the conventional movie machinery of redemption. The journey does not magically transform him into a grateful young man who has learned the value of friendship. That would betray the entire premise. Sheridan is still Sheridan, but the film slowly reveals how much of his behavior has been enabled by a world that can afford to keep giving him another chance.

Dave Franco, however, is the movie’s comic MVP.

Mark feels like a role built around Franco’s gift for playing men whose confidence exists in inverse proportion to their competence. He is boisterous, impulsive and frequently vacant, but Franco never turns him into a caricature. The funniest thing about Mark is how completely he believes himself.

That makes the recurring philosophy about everyone doing their best even funnier. Mark is not being ironic. Somewhere inside his deeply questionable worldview is a genuine belief that people deserve a little grace because most of them are trying, even if the evidence suggests their efforts could use significant improvement.

Franco knows how to let a beat sit without reaching for the joke. When Mark responds to something profound with an answer that is simultaneously ridiculous and strangely reasonable, Franco treats it as the most natural thought in the world. That deadpan conviction keeps the character from becoming exhausting.

O’Shea Jackson Jr. provides the ideal counterweight. Davis is anxious enough to recognize that things are going wrong, but not competent enough to stop them. Jackson gives him an inherent likability that makes his desperation feel human rather than pathetic.

The opening joke about Davis accidentally taking a church youth group to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist establishes Blair’s sensibility almost perfectly. The scenario is absurd, but the comedy comes from how seriously everyone discusses the consequences afterward. Blair allows the ridiculous premise to breathe instead of sprinting toward a punchline.

That approach runs throughout Idiots. The funniest scenes often involve characters attempting to maintain normal conversation after normality has already left the building. One mistake creates another. The attempted solution creates three more. Eventually the original problem almost seems quaint.

Kiernan Shipka understands that rhythm immediately as Irina, a sex worker pulled into the expanding mess. She plays the character with a tired practicality that makes everyone around her seem even more ridiculous. Peter Dinklage and Nicholas Braun later contribute to an increasingly bizarre supporting ensemble, with Braun committing completely to the magnificently named Pricka Bush Da Werewoof.

That all-star supporting cast helps give the movie the feeling that another strange character might be waiting around every corner. Blair does not stop the story to announce anyone’s arrival. People wander into this disaster, alter its trajectory and occasionally make everything much worse.

The episodic construction can make Idiots feel uneven. Some detours are much stronger than others, and the movie occasionally comes close to mistaking randomness for momentum. Yet I found those shifts considerably easier to accept on a second viewing because the emotional logic underneath them remained surprisingly consistent.

These are desperate people trying to improvise their way through circumstances they cannot control. Blair’s movie behaves in much the same way. It keeps moving, changes direction unexpectedly and somehow finds another terrible decision whenever the previous one appears impossible to top.

And yes, the explosive diarrhea sequence is tremendous.

That gag also illustrates why Blair’s lowbrow humor works more often than it should. He is not embarrassed by stupidity or bad taste. Idiots does not believe a film has to choose between having an intelligent premise and putting Dave Franco through gastrointestinal hell.

The class satire actually benefits from that lack of pretension. Blair is interested in labor, money and the unequal consequences of failure, but he never asks the characters to articulate those ideas for us. They are too busy trying to survive the next problem.

That is what I missed some of the first time.

At Sundance, the immediate pleasures were obvious. Franco is hilarious. Jackson is enormously likable. Thames is wonderfully punchable. The movie keeps finding new ways to derail itself, and a packed festival audience can make that kind of comedy feel almost effortless.

On a second viewing, the compassion underneath it became much clearer.

“Everyone’s just doing their best” is not an excuse for everything these characters do. Blair is too smart for that. Understanding why somebody makes a terrible choice does not erase the consequences of that choice.

What the film offers instead is empathy without absolution. Davis is trying. Mark, astonishingly, is probably trying too. Sheridan may even be operating somewhere near the limits of what a childhood insulated by wealth has prepared him to understand.

They are all idiots in different ways. Blair simply refuses to conclude that being an idiot makes someone disposable.

That idea gives the movie an unexpected tenderness. Idiots can be cynical about institutions, money and the ways people treat one another, but it is rarely cynical about people themselves. Even at its most vulgar, there is an underlying belief that human beings deserve another chance to get something right.

Some of them will waste that chance immediately.

That is part of the joke.

Blair does not need his characters to become different people by the end. He only needs us to see them a little differently. The result is a comedy much more generous than its title suggests and much more intelligent than its collection of drugs, criminals, terrible plans and bodily fluids initially advertises.

Franco, Jackson and Thames are perfectly matched because none of them is playing the same kind of fool. Their chemistry keeps the movie moving through its rougher patches, while Shipka, Dinklage and Braun give the road trip enough eccentricity to make its world feel unpredictable.

Idiots is not perfectly controlled. That may be unavoidable for a movie whose personality depends on appearing slightly out of control. What matters is that Blair ultimately knows what all of the chaos is serving.

Everyone is just doing their best. Some people are better at it. Some people have money to cushion the landing. And others get knocked down, make several worse decisions, and somehow end up heroes in the process.

Rating: ★★★★☆

THAT’S A WRAP | IDIOTS

CREDITS
Release Date: August 28, 2026
Distributor: Independent Film Company
Writer/Director: Macon Blair
Cast: Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Mason Thames, Kiernan Shipka, Nicholas Braun, Peter Dinklage
Festival Premiere: 2026 Sundance Film Festival (as The Shitheads)
Runtime: 100 minutes
Rating: R

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Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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