‘Idiots’ Review: Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore [B] Atlanta Film Festival

It doesn’t matter whether you call writer-director Macon Blair’s raucous new comedy by its festival-circuit title, The Shitheads, or its cleaner, more marketable new name, Idiots — either way, the title is a bit of a misnomer. Neither quite captures the existential angst buried within the film’s genre-blending mix of grimy dark comedy and gritty thriller. If you think this is a simple buddy road trip about the mismatched trio of Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and Mason Thames, remember: this is from the guy who made I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore.

It’s also from a crew of notable executive producers — Jody Hill, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, and Jeremy Saulnier — whose collective artistic ethos is stamped all over the film’s raunchy, sordid antics and exploitation-type bursts of violence. It doesn’t all land, but Idiots is funny, volatile, and genuinely melancholic, the work of a filmmaker who is first and foremost a movie fan (what other movie would fit in screen time of characters watching Häxan and The Hitchhiker?), but also someone who understands how his characters’ ludicrous actions reflect a deeper sadness and yearning for goodness at the heart of modern America. It also has a very good projectile diarrhea joke.

That’s Blair’s mode: insights into the human condition filtered through genre-movie crassness and the grime of everyday Americana. At the center of it all are Davis (Jackson) and Mark (Franco), two contrasting personalities who’ve both recently lost their jobs. Davis, a devout Christian, was let go from his church after accidentally taking the Bible Study kids to a screening of Lars von Trier’s decidedly non-Biblical Antichrist; Mark was fired for refusing to stop being drunk and high at his dead-end call center job. The two end up as transporters, delivering troubled youth to juvenile rehabilitation programs. Their first assignment is Sheridan (Thames), a stuck-up, condescending trust-fund kid apparently being sent away for a drug habit.

Blair isn’t content to let Idiots coast on clashing personalities alone. Sheridan turns out to have a far more insidious streak — he’s famous, cunning, and prone to violence — and what begins as a simple delivery spirals into a full-blown retrieval mission. As Sheridan repeatedly slips through his often hapless captors’ fingers, the chaos expands to pull in an unlikely ensemble: Eastern European stripper Irina (Kiernan Shipka), who has her own stake in getting Sheridan back, and a ragtag bumpkin militia that includes Peter Dinklage and Nicholas Braun, the latter credited as “Pricka Bush Da Werewoof,” a white rapper sporting spiky box braids and face tattoos, who answers the teen’s social media call to rescue him from the two “perverts” who kidnapped him.

All of them get caught in the crossfire of Sheridan’s sociopathic cruelty. Thames is perfectly punchable in the role, and his character is well beyond redemption. Yet he functions as a dark mirror for the people around him. That’s especially true of Mark and Davis, whose focus on simply completing a straightforward job masks a buried anger and capacity for violence that each handles differently. Mark is reckless and impulsive; you believe him when he says he just wants to be done with Sheridan and the whole hellish situation by any means necessary. Irina cuts through any ambiguity when she tells Mark that he and Sheridan are more alike than he’d care to admit.

Jackson gets the more emotionally complex role. Davis is a straight-laced altruist whose ethical limits are steadily eroded as capturing Sheridan demands tapping into fiercer, darker impulses. Outwardly, he’s a bleeding heart: he prays aloud and sees inherent goodness in people. But dealing with Sheridan’s cruelty unlocks something in Davis, a capacity for aggression he’d rather not acknowledge. He may put it toward virtuous ends, but its source is uncomfortably close to the man he believes himself nothing like.

Late in the film, Davis asks, “Is it true that we’re all doing the best we can at any given moment?” Blair extends this question across his entire cast of misfits and monsters. It doesn’t entirely land, as someone like Sheridan is too purely unlikable to be offered a genuine olive branch of philosophical understanding, even when a late-film reversal has Davis and Mark rescuing him from the very kind of violence he’s inflicted on others. He’s still, ultimately, too much of a shit to fully invest in, and Idiots elsewhere can be scatterbrained in terms of which new characters it wants to offer a heavier focus. But the egalitarian spirit behind Blair’s theme is honorable, and it flirts with real poignancy, even if the film’s relentless rambunctiousness keeps it from getting all the way there.

If nothing else, Idiots works as a visceral experience. It’s packed with hard-hitting and gross-out sight gags, and the Franco-Jackson pairing bears real comic fruit, as both performers get memorable moments that advance the plot and deepen their characters. Jackson earns his mid-movie meltdown on Sheridan because the script does the work of convincing you he’s been holding back far too long. In some ways, Sheridan and the rest of the ensemble exist primarily as catalysts for Davis’s internal reckoning, and you can feel that in the film’s flighty, ever-expanding cast of newcomers. But through genuinely funny performances and the palpable existentialism of a director still trying to make sense of the world’s ceaseless chaos, Idiots mostly lands its desperate cry of wanting to understand — haphazard turmoil and all.

Grade: B

This review is from the Atlanta Film Festival. Independent Film Company will release Idiots in theaters on August 28, 2026.