Idiots Subjects Us to Stupidity on Both Sides of the Camera

I am tired of watching films made by friends of directors. Idiots helmer Macon Blair got his start by playing lead roles in Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party and Blue Ruin. Both were well regarded indies that deservingly led to a prosperous career for Saulnier. Blair has gotten to coast off of Saulnier’s goodwill ever since, despite being a decidedly more mediocre filmmaker. I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore was a plain suburban revenge film buoyed by a committed Melanie Lynskey turn. The Toxic Avenger took the bones of one of the most ridiculous and idiosyncratic cult films ever made and mashed them into a putty of bog-standard “Hard R” violence that somehow left me yearning for Deadpool. Regardless, Blair still secured funding for Idiots, an alleged comedy that is antagonistic towards every sub-genre it tries to fuse together. Is this a stoner buddy flick? Not really. These people hate each other. Is it a bleak deconstruction of classic road trip tropes? Eh. We just find ourselves bumbling through slightly more sadistic variants of the typical stops. It doesn’t even have the decency to be funny. Everyone involved seems to be actively realizing that they are not in the Jeremy Saulnier film they imagined. 

We center on two guys who just can’t get it together. Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr) is a Christian teacher who finds himself fired for passively showing a wildly inappropriate movie to his students. Not in a child molester way, he’s just clueless ol’ Davis. Mark (Dave Franco) is a stoner who gets axed from his call center job for being high on site. Makes sense. The two find themselves meeting outside of the one gig they can get, shuttling troubled folks to rehabilitation centers. They’re tasked with taking wealthy sociopathic influencer Sheridan (Mason Thames) somewhere he can’t set unhoused people on fire. 

Insufferable protagonists require effortlessly charismatic actors who are able to make them riveting enough to follow. Blair has assembled a crew of B-Listers who are all far too self conscious to make anything happen. O’Shea Jackson Jr has excelled as mellow comic relief in Ingrid Goes West and Long Shot. Davis just comes across as a whiney liability. There’s a self righteous streak to this character that is so inconsistent with his goofy decision making. He’ll chastise Mark for being stupid and then turn around and be the center of a listless comedy bit. A particularly embarrassing scene where he rage baits a security guard with “yo momma” jokes is the low point. He shares no chemistry with Franco, who is on sleaze-bag autopilot, in agitation or reluctant friendship. The ice never breaks. There’s no sincere moment of connection between these two men despite their differences. They just struggle through their misadventures until the movie is over, inexplicably caring for one another by that point. Meanwhile, Thames is completely unconvincing as the wildcard. It’s surprising considering how terrific he was as a teenage wannabe punk in Nimrods just a couple weeks ago. Here, he simply cannot pull off actual menace or unpredictability. We’re supposed to see Sheridan as a pathetic freaked out rich kid but the right performance would’ve still made us fearful of his mania and saddened by his disdain for the world at such a young age. 

We’ve got two major set-pieces. The first involves hired dancer Irina’s (Kiernan Shipka, Russian for some reason) money getting stolen after an embarrassing hotel room incident. Shipka mostly just stands around looking confused and beyond a brief gross-out gag the scenario never really escalates. Then, Sheridan gets more than he bargained for by sicking his followers on the boys. We meet kidnappers Koko (Peter Dinklage) and Prika Bush Da Werewoof (Nicholas Braun). Dinklage gives his typical snotty performance just in a backwards hat. Braun is doing some insane variant on the white boy rapper routine that is barely less trite than Ali G. Blair doesn’t make these encounters meaningful. These people don’t significantly impact Davis, Mark and Sheridan beyond putting them in a bit of danger or demanding their cash back. Even a bit of extra gore and viscera doesn’t add to the sense of consequence. It’s all just a performative attempt to make the audience feel like they’re not watching their daddy’s road trip comedy. Frankly, I wish that I was. 

This is the part of the review where I usually say that Idiots squandered its potential. However, I’m not sure if there was any. Macon Blair is a filmmaker with proximity to prestige who has yet to deliver anything of merit on his own steam. This cast is fine but unexciting. We’ve seen this premise a million times before. Ultimately, the real idiots are the financiers who decided to subject the fifty five people who will wander into the theater for this to such blatant mediocrity. This failure won’t affect anyone involved. Blair’s next dud is all but guaranteed to be a part of that year’s Sundance lineup. Boys club membership lasts forever.