Two rock-bottom drivers, one rich kid, and a road trip that goes sideways before it ever goes straight: that's the engine of Idiots, the new Hollywood comedy-crime caper from director Macon Blair that has been raising eyebrows and blood pressure in equal measure since its August 20 release.
The premise sounds almost tidy on paper. Mark (Dave Franco) and Davis (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) are a pair of drivers who have bottomed out - professionally, personally, probably spiritually. When they're handed a simple assignment - ferry a wealthy teenager named Sheridan (Mason Thames) to rehab - it looks like the easiest money they've ever made. It isn't. Sheridan has other ideas, and those ideas arrive wrapped in drugs, danger, and a steadily escalating pile of criminal complications that turns a straightforward drive into a full-blown disaster.
The film runs a lean 100 minutes, and by all indications Blair treats that runtime as a resource to be spent rather than padded. He directs from a script that keeps the tone balanced between comedy and crime without letting either element fully swallow the other - a trickier proposition than it sounds, since the subgenre is littered with movies that either go too soft on the mayhem or forget to be funny. Blair, who also appears in the film as a character listed simply as D.D., has built a reputation for finding humor in desperate people. Here he applies that instinct to a story that is at least partly about how quickly a bad day can curdle into a bad life.
Franco and Jackson Jr. anchor the movie as the two drivers whose competence is never quite established and whose judgment is never quite reliable. Franco's Mark and Jackson Jr.'s Davis form the kind of mismatched duo that crime comedies live and die on, and the casting suggests an intentional contrast - one seemingly more chaotic, one seemingly more put-upon, both in well over their heads. A road movie lives or dies on the chemistry inside the car, and the film asks a lot of that pair, given how much of the chaos originates from the back seat.
That back seat belongs to Mason Thames, whose Sheridan is the wealthy teen at the center of the wreckage. Thames has moved steadily into heavier material in recent years, and Sheridan reads as another step in that direction: a kid whose problems can't be solved by simply delivering him somewhere, no matter how much the adults around him would like to believe otherwise. Kiernan Shipka appears as Irina Anastas, part of the orbit of characters that Sheridan drags into the story - an orbit that is not, by the sound of it, populated by stabilizing influences.
Speaking of destabilizing influences: Peter Dinklage shows up as Karl "Koko" Sandoz, a name that carries its own weather system. Nicholas Braun, meanwhile, is credited as Joe Thom Pell, also known as Pricka Bush Da Werewoof - a character designation that tells you nearly everything you need to know about the register the film is operating in during its wilder stretches. Lynn Wanlass plays Bodha "Baba" Anastas, rounding out a cast that seems deliberately assembled for maximum texture and minimum predictability. Blair himself steps in front of the camera as D.D., alongside a credit for His Buddy.
Reception has been reasonably warm, if not rapturous. TMDb currently shows a 6.621 out of 10, while IMDb sits at 6.2. Those numbers place the film in the territory of a solid, well-liked genre entry rather than an out-of-nowhere sensation - the sort of movie that finds its audience through word of mouth and late-night streaming rather than opening-weekend fireworks. The modest spread between the two aggregates suggests viewers broadly agree on what the movie is, even if they disagree on how well it lands.
What's interesting about Idiots is where it sits in Blair's filmography. He's spent years working in and around stories about people operating well outside the lines - as a director, and as a fixture of the indie crime world both in front of and behind the camera. Idiots appears to take that sensibility and apply it to a broader, more overtly comedic canvas. The genre label of comedy-crime is doing a lot of work here, and the film's willingness to let the danger escalate while keeping the jokes in play is, by most accounts, its defining characteristic.
It's also a distinctly Hollywood product: English-language, studio-side, and built around a recognizable ensemble. The cast list reads like a Rolodex of actors who are consistently more interesting than the material they're sometimes handed. Giving Franco, Jackson Jr., Thames, Shipka, Dinklage, and Braun a single car and a plan that falls apart in real time is the kind of setup that either clicks immediately or never does. The ratings suggest it clicks more often than not.
Idiots is out now, having opened August 20. It runs 100 minutes. And if the premise suggests anything, it's that the shortest route between two points is almost never the one these characters take.
