Two Bozos, One Sociopath, Zero Plan: Macon Blair's Gloriously Unhinged Road Comedy is a Blast

There is a scene early in Idiots where Davis, played by O'Shea Jackson Jr., gets fired from his job at a Presbyterian church for taking the youth group to a screening of Lars von Trier's Antichrist under the sincere belief that it was an educational film about the life of Jesus. That one scene tells you everything you need to know about the film you are about to watch, the register it is operating in, and whether you are the right audience for it.

If that setup made you laugh, buckle in. If it made you wince, this may not be your movie. Macon Blair is not interested in meeting you halfway.

Blair has built a genuinely fascinating filmography across his career, both as an actor in Jeremy Saulnier's uncompromising thrillers and as a director with I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore and his gonzo Toxic Avenger reboot. He has a rare knack for using outsized, chaotic situations to illuminate something true about the indignities of ordinary American life, specifically the experience of people who are trying their best in a system designed to reward the worst.

Idiots is the fullest expression of that instinct yet, wrapped in the packaging of a road trip comedy that keeps escalating its chaos until you are genuinely unsure what genre you are watching. Comedy? Horror? Action? Macon Blair's answer appears to be: yes.

The premise is elegant in its simplicity. Davis and Mark, played by Jackson Jr. and Dave Franco respectively, are two down-on-their-luck, wildly unqualified men hired to transport a wealthy teenager named Sheridan to a rehab facility across the state. Sheridan, played by Mason Thames with a specific, deeply committed obnoxiousness that will make you want to reach through the screen, has absolutely no intention of going quietly. What follows is the kind of escalating disaster that makes you keep asking how it could possibly get worse while Blair keeps finding new answers to that question.

The film works as well as it does almost entirely because of its cast, and specifically because of the chemistry between Jackson Jr. and Franco. These are two performers with very different comic energies, Jackson Jr. playing the well-meaning, perpetually put-upon everyman with a single tear seemingly always on the verge of rolling down his face, and Franco leaning into a more cynical, chaotic frequency that brings real Bill Lumbergh meets Randal Graves energy to every scene. Together they create a dynamic that feels genuinely lived-in, the kind of reluctant partnership that generates comedy not from the situation alone but from the specific friction between two people who would never have chosen each other.

The film belongs to the tradition of Midnight Run crossed with the unhinged excess of The Hangover, and the central duo is why that combination mostly works.

Thames deserves particular credit for committing so fully to being genuinely hateable. Playing a sociopathic trust fund kid who exists at the intersection of entitlement and malice is not easy to do without becoming cartoonish, and Thames finds the specific register that keeps Sheridan believable while making him absolutely insufferable. The film understands that a road trip comedy lives or dies by the quality of its antagonist, and Sheridan is a very effective one. The supporting cast, which includes some unexpected faces doing career-opposite work, adds texture and provides several genuine moments of audience-audible shock.

Visually, Idiots is stronger than you might expect from a film operating in this register. Guillermo Garza's cinematography gives the film a stylish quality that elevates the material beyond pure chaos, and Dane McMaster's editing keeps the tonal shifts moving at a pace that generally prevents any single sequence from overstaying its welcome. Blair has an instinct for when to let a joke breathe and when to cut before it collapses, and that instinct serves the film well in its stronger first half particularly.

The film also has, beneath all the mayhem, something genuine to say about working-class people trying to do the right thing while being systematically failed by wealth and privilege at every turn. It does not always articulate that theme as cleanly as it might, but it is there, and its presence gives the film a slightly harder edge than its comedy-first packaging suggests.

Where the film stumbles is in its back half, which loses some of the narrative focus that the setup so efficiently establishes. The film moves from set piece to set piece with real energy but occasionally at the expense of the character work that would make those set pieces land with more weight. I found myself wanting slightly more time with the central duo in the quieter moments, the spaces between disasters where relationships actually develop. The journey has real momentum but two of its major stops overstay their welcome, and there are moments in the second half where you can feel Blair choosing escalation over consolidation when the reverse might have served the story better.

None of that significantly undercuts the overall experience, which is genuinely funny, occasionally insane, and best appreciated with the largest possible crowd. Idiots is exactly the kind of film the current theatrical landscape is hungry for: an original, R-rated, uncompromising studio comedy that trusts its audience to keep up and does not sand off any of its edges to make the ride smoother.

Blair is a filmmaker who embraces excess as a philosophical position, and while that is occasionally a liability here, it is far more often an asset. This is a good time at the movies, full stop, and in 2026, that is not a small thing to say.

*Featured image Idiots (2026, IFC)