Idiots review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 08.27.26
★★ 2 / 5
Spoiler-free review
A movie can surround me with awful people and still work if those people are funny, fascinating or recognizably human. Idiots gives me a delinquent teenager and two deeply unequipped men stumbling through a disastrous assignment, but never finds the quality that would make spending time with them worthwhile. The filmmaking and performances are competent; the problem is a story that seems to expect sympathy or solidarity its characters never earn. I left less offended than completely unconvinced that this story needed telling.
Full review — contains spoilers
I didn’t vibe with Idiots because I didn’t like any of the characters in Idiots. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you’re not supposed to like the people in a movie, and you can have something like The Drama or The Invite where most everybody involved is an asshole to one degree or another and the movie still works. The problem here is that none of these people were relatable to me and none of them were interesting or fun enough to make up for it.
Dave Franco plays a stoner loser type, a middle-aged guy who’s basically a bum. He’s working with O’Shea Jackson Jr., and the two of them are supposed to transport a delinquent kid, played by Mason Thames, to where he needs to go. Then everything goes wrong. The kid is an asshole, and not in some fun movie way. He does really awful things to a lot of people and I kept waiting for the movie to give me a reason why I was supposed to overlook it or empathize with him. I didn’t. I think the kid needs to go to jail, and honestly the guys transporting him probably need to go to jail too. By the end the movie seems to want some kind of solidarity among these people because they’ve all been through this experience together, and I didn’t understand that at all. Everybody in this movie needed to go to jail as far as I was concerned. I didn’t like any of them, I didn’t vibe with any of them, and I didn’t enjoy spending time with them.
This is competently shot, the acting isn’t bad, and these are professional actors doing what they’ve been given to do. I just think the story is bad and the characters are bad. I don’t understand why this story needed to be made, and I don’t understand what I was supposed to get out of it. I didn’t like it.