What’s It About

Two rock-bottom drivers transport a wealthy teen to rehab, but their simple job spirals into a chaotic journey of drugs, danger, and crime as their passenger derails their plans.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Before the movie even starts, there’s already a story worth telling. Director Macon Blair’s third film landed in theaters under the name Idiots, but it grew up in the world as The Shitheads. That title got wiped clean before anyone bought a ticket, which makes sense. You can’t put a word like that on a marquee and walk away clean. The same thing happened to Zoë Kravitz’s film Blink Twice, which was originally called Pussy Island before someone made a smarter call. These things happen in Hollywood. But what makes the Idiots title switch feel like a missed moment is that the movie itself never earns anything bold. It doesn’t feel daring. It doesn’t feel raw. It just feels flat. If you’re going to start with a name that pushes buttons, the movie needs to actually push something too. The setup is simple enough. Davis, played by O’Shea Jackson Jr., is a churchgoing man who loses his job after an embarrassing incident where he takes a group of children to a very wrong movie, one involving what his pastor and boss (Killer Mike) carefully describes as “dong going in.” Davis picks up a new gig at a shady transport company called Dorindo Services, where he gets paired with Mark, a couch-crashing, constantly high slacker played by Dave Franco. Their first job together is driving a wealthy, emotionally troubled teenager named Sheridan (Mason Thames) to a rehab facility. Things fall apart fast. Sheridan drugs Mark during a hotel stop involving a stripper played by Kiernan Shipka. He disappears. Davis and Mark are left holding nothing but their own failure, chasing a kid who is already three steps ahead of both of them. There’s a real movie buried somewhere in that idea. Two barely-functioning adults losing a rich teenager who completely outsmarts them? That’s genuinely funny. And in the moments when Idiots simply lets that be the movie it is, things actually click. Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. build real chemistry when the film lets them breathe together. Watching them argue over religion, blame each other for the latest disaster, or fail at the most basic tasks, those scenes have life in them. Jackson especially brings something solid to Davis. The character is grounded, self-serious, and completely overwhelmed, and Jackson plays all of that without turning Davis into a clown. He is easily the most watchable thing in the film, the one steady presence keeping the whole story from spinning off completely. However, Macon Blair can’t help but remove the camera from the parts that actually work in order to find something deeper. The film comes to a halt so that it can wring out meaning from characters who are simply not strong enough to carry that load. Davis wants to be some kind of role model to Sheridan, an ideal kind of mature man from whom a young man can learn something. Mark wants to come across as competent and credible, revealing many instances of his own experience with drugs in order to create an impression of nobility and importance. In the end, both of them are just transferring all of their weaknesses onto the teenage boy, which raises a very interesting point in the film: perhaps, foolish adults and depraved children are actually not so different from one another. That deserves a deeper exploration, but the screenplay fails to do that. Therefore, the idea of the film remains ineffective. And jokes need quite a bit of space. The movie’s first scene gives us a preview of this issue. Davis is sitting right across from Killer Mike’s pastor figure, being scolded for what those kids have seen. This setup should work perfectly, being a conversation between two professionals regarding something completely absurd. However, as this scene lasts too long, the timing fails, and the awkwardness does not lead to any laughs. This same thing happens again and again throughout the movie. Nicolas Braun joins the cast later on as Pricka Bush Da Werewoof, a horrorcore rapper inspired by werewolf culture. It’s clear Braun is putting in an effort, talking about tasting blood as if it were candy, but rather than making him appear the part, it brings out the weaknesses in the material even more. The way this character is created brings to mind the performance by James Franco in Spring Breakers, without bringing in danger. Peter Dinklage also appears in a cameo as Koko, a local figure that is introduced through some heavy metal music. Similar to Braun’s character, Koko feels more like an interruption than someone who is integral to the plot. The line “Somebody is doing their best at this moment” seems to be the same kind of statement you can read on a poster that is motivational. In the beginning, this statement sounds like a means of characterization, but in the end acts more like an excuse from the movie makers. The one place Idiots actually earns its laughs is with the “yo momma” jokes that drop throughout the film. They’re simple, they hit clean, and they work every single time. Which might be the lesson the whole movie needed. The more ambitious the film gets, the less funny it becomes. A road comedy about two grown men losing a teenager to his own chaos doesn’t need to search for its soul. It needs to stay in the lane it started in, trust the chemistry between its two leads, and move with more energy than it can apparently manage. Idiots had everything it needed to be a genuinely entertaining disaster. Instead, it just became one.

OUR RATING – A LAZY 2