Macon Blair’s new film arrives with the title Idiots, but it began life, and even premiered, under the name The Shitheads. That any semblance of commercial aspirations obviously dictated that it would not make it to theaters with its naughty name intact — the same way Zoe Kravitz’s Blink Twice was never going to be released under its original title, Pussy Island — makes the initial titling decision seem a little boneheaded. Whether the swear words are intended as a thumb-in-the-eye bit of provocation or simple, unbelievable naivete about social norms can only be divined from the end product. And since nothing in Idiots is at all charged, the filmmakers might just be as oblivious as their main character, who we meet as he’s being fired from his job for unwittingly bringing a field trip of children to an erotic movie.
Now down on his luck and minus a van, Davis (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) is left with only his other job, driving for a transport service that delivers distressed individuals to care facilities. His new partner, Mark, fresh off his own job loss, is the type of annoying stoner Dave Franco slips into without much effort, a lazy approximation of an archetype his older brother used to play. Mark is so catastrophically incompetent that he makes Davis seem like a put-together adult by comparison, which mostly just means Jackson — the more naturally compelling screen presence of the two and whose solidity is the closest thing Idiots has to a center of gravity — gets to play very little in the way of delivering a character arc, or even really do much of anything at all. Their first job together, in Mark’s beat up car, is transporting emotionally problematic rich teenager Sheridan Kimberly (Mason Thames) to rehab at his parents’ behest.
As two washed-up losers, Davis and Mark each want to project an image of themselves onto Sheridan. Davis sees in young people the opportunity to appear as the responsible man he wants to be, the type of guy a confused teenager could look up to without becoming wholly unrelatable to a troubled teen. Mark, on the other hand, wants to come off as tough but hip, sharing inappropriate details of his own drug use to try to impress Sheridan in order to pose as hardened. Of course, these attitudes just serve to make them vulnerable to manipulation as Sheridan reveals himself to be an actually dangerous avatar for rich boy influencer culture and escapes their custody in a violent, drug-aided sequence involving a stripper (Kiernan Shipka) in a hotel room.
The generational divide material, which suggests that destructive idiocy brings together men from across all age demographics, is Idiots’ richest idea, but one that is let down by a simplistic screenplay that struggles to define character and strains for comedy as Mark and Davis try to complete their job in a series of increasingly crazy (at least on paper) scenarios. And most detrimental to a film of this persuasion, Idiots suffers from a surprising lack of energy, where the heightened misadventures of these shitheads play out with little spark. It’s rarely funny, forgoing joke writing — except for the very fresh “yo momma” jokes repeated throughout — for tiresome gags, like an exasperating sequence featuring Nicholas Braun as a rapper called Pricka Bush Da Werewoof. A throwback of sorts to the anarchic stoner comedies that thrived in the late-2000s, Blair’s film is simply never quite chaotic enough to live up to its premise or lineage. Ultimately, the most interesting thing about Idiots is that it used to be called The Shitheads.
DIRECTOR: Macon Blair; CAST: Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Mason Thames, Kiernan Shipka, Nicholas Braun; DISTRIBUTOR: Independent Film Company; IN THEATERS: August 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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