“Idiots” Plays it Safe and Stoner
The road to Macon Blair’s theatrical run of Idiots was eight years in the making. Back in 2017, it was announced that Blair was writing and directing a film, originally called The Shitheads, with Luke Wilson and Tracy Morgan in the lead roles. A year later, Morgan left the project and was replaced with Ron Funches. When the film, still going by its original name, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, an entirely new crop of actors had been cast. In many ways, the now-titled Idiots feels like it’s still stuck in the 2010s without being modernized to meet the current state of the world.
Idiots begins in an unlikely place: the office of a pastor (Killer Mike). He’s chastising Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) for taking a group of teens to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. That film, unbeknownst to Davis, is not about a godly fight for the soul of the world. It’s about a grieving married couple having increasingly violent sex. He’s (obviously) fired from working with kids in this setting, but he does have another job: transporting troubled teens to rehab. Davis is partnered with Mark (Dave Franco), a new hire, to drive Sheridan Kimberley (Mason Thames) to the treatment facility. Much like the Antichrist fiasco, neither Davis nor Mark did their research about this kid, who has a reputation for being an utter menace.
Courtesy of IFC
There’s a subtle difference between “idiot” and “shithead.” A shithead is someone who knowingly wreaks havoc for the thrill of ruining people’s lives. An idiot is someone who is likely trying their best, but their best leaves something to be desired. One could argue that Mark and Davis are idiots and Sheridan is a shithead. Mark tells Davis that there’s a belief that everyone is doing the best that they can at any moment in time. While there’s room for debate in that belief system, it does prove that Mark is attempting to be decent, but he lacks a fundamental drive to work on himself. Sheridan, on the other hand, is so far up into his own self-centered ego that he can’t possibly consider the needs of anyone else.
On paper, this is an interesting premise. Mark and Davis are an Odd Couple pair, with Davis wanting everything to be by the book and Mark openly discussing drug usage with Sheridan. Throw in a spoiled rich kid who has never faced consequences in his life and you have all the ingredients for a nightmare of a road movie. Idiots leans into the stoner comedy of it all, but it’s mostly jokes that would land better if you too were partaking in some of the legal recreational drugs of your area. Prolonged sequences of drug-induced paranoia and bodily fluids being projectile-shot out of a person’s body speak to a specific brand of humor. That’s something that tickles some funny bones, and Idiots has more where that came from.
Courtesy of IFC
The three main characters do not emotionally change over the course of the film. Idiots may have started in 2017 as a silly stoner movie about two idiots and a teenage nuisance, but in its current state, there are flashes of social commentary. Why are the guys with no money subjected to the rules of the world when people like Sheridan can pay enough to make it all go away? It’s not as though anyone was expecting introspection from these characters, but then the sometimes dramatic tone of the film doesn’t work. Blair’s script doesn’t find a way to thread social commentary with low-brow stoner jokes, and that’s fair. It’s an extremely hard balance to find. Idiots would have benefitted from separating these genres into two different paths and choosing one. As Idiots stands, it’s not a new or well-developed look at the broken systems that keep rich people rich and poor people poor, nor does it crack a joke about something that hasn’t already happened in a frat house somewhere in America.
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