Synopsis: Two spectacularly unqualified guys take a job driving a rich teenager to rehab. The trip is supposed to be simple. It is not.
Stars: Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Mason Thames, Kiernan Shipka, Killer Mike Render, Nicholas Braun, Peter Dinklage
Director: Macon Blair
Rated: R (sexual material, pervasive language, drug content, some violence/bloody images)
Running Length: 99 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Macon Blair knows exactly why the slacker road comedies of the 2000s worked, and he gets close to the feeling without ever landing it. Nicholas Braun is the one live wire in a film that keeps changing gears. 
Idiots Review: Close, But Never Quite the Recipe
It’s been almost a year to the day since I covered Macon Blair‘s last film, the flat Toxic Avenger remake. Nice to report that Idiots is at least a step up from that sludge.
Blair is grasping at the bones of the slacker-stoner comedies of the 2000s. Those movies turned Seth Rogen, Chris Rock, Ice Cube, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill and, yes, James Franco into household names. He captures the essence of what made those movies last. He never quite finds the full flavor.
That’s not for lack of effort, and it starts with the casting of a different Franco. Dave plays a role James would surely have been up for, had he not been shown the door out of Hollywood’s A-list. He’s paired with Ice Cube’s son, O’Shea Jackson Jr., as two drivers working for a company that transports patients to rehab facilities. Jackson’s character needs to take the job seriously because he needs the work. Franco’s just needs the money.
Their first assignment is a snotty trust-fund kid played by Mason Thames, who has his own ideas about how this trip is going to go.
Leaning Into the Expectation Instead of Past It
By now you’re thinking of every film you’ve seen with this exact setup, and Blair is counting on that. Rather than take the premise somewhere new, he leans in and doubles down. What follows is a wake of trashed hotel rooms, foul bathroom incidents, Russian escorts with hearts of gold and assorted other disasters in the rearview.
It’s intermittently funny, mostly thanks to some unexpectedly juvenile swings. The problem is rhythm. The film rarely sets a joke up and lets it breathe before sprinting at the punchline. The result is a comedy that always seems to be hunting for the next bit instead of building anything.
Blair is credited alone on the script. The premise came to him years ago from producer Alex Orr, while the two were working on Blue Ruin. Something about that origin story shows. The idea is good. The connective tissue is thin.
Nicholas Braun Is the Only One Having Fun
A late appearance from frequent Blair collaborator Peter Dinklage doesn’t lift the energy the way it should. Dinklage is clearly stretching, and I respect the attempt, but he carries an innate class that sits badly against the gutter-level absurdity Blair does best. The role never fits him.
Nicholas Braun is the exception, and he’s terrific. He keeps pulling further from his Succession register with a wild turn as Joe Thom Pell, better known as Pricka Bush da Werewolf. The character is a disciple of Dinklage’s small-time syndicate with dreams of conquering the music industry. Braun is having an absolute blast, and his scenes are the only stretch where the movie finds the loose, anything-goes spirit it’s chasing all night.
Thames has to sell the premise, and he’s game for it. He’s coming off How to Train Your Dragon and swinging hard at an R-rated brat. The writing keeps handing him attitude where it should be handing him a person.
Kiernan Shipka and Killer Mike Render round out a cast that’s more interesting on paper than the script gives it room to be.
Thirteen Years, Two Titles, Three Casts
The path here explains a lot. Blair announced this in 2017 under the title The Sh*theads, with Luke Wilson and Tracy Morgan attached. Morgan dropped out and Ron Funches replaced him. By February 2025 the whole cast had turned over, with Franco, Jackson and Dinklage in and Wilson and Funches out. Thames joined that July. They shot in Paulding County, Georgia, in the fall of 2025 and the film premiered in Sundance with its original title this past January where it found a distributor who quickly retitled it.
The team behind the camera is stacked with Blair’s people. Guillermo Garza shot it and Dane McMaster cut it. The score comes from Will and Brooke Blair, the brothers behind Blue Ruin and Green Room. Hunter Brown designed it and Karen Freed did the costumes.
That music credit is the tell. Those same composers built the dread in Jeremy Saulnier’s best work. Here they’re being asked to score a comedy that keeps changing its mind about how mean it wants to be.
The Road Should Be an Invitation
Idiots never settles into a gear it can hold. Even the road-trip setting feels wasted. The film shot in Georgia and there’s almost nothing worth looking at. That’s strange, because scenery is one of the great pleasures of this genre. The open road should be an invitation to get lost in increasingly ridiculous situations. Instead this one spends its time looking for the next place to pull over.
There’s enough here to show that Blair understands why these movies worked. Understanding the ingredients isn’t the same thing as getting the recipe right.
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