Idiots review – throwback bro comedy is an entertaining summer seat-filler

Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr lead a goofy roadtrip comedy that is just sharp enough to keep you strapped in Idiots is billed as a return to the raunchy bro comedies of the 2000s like Pineapple Express and The Hangover and about halfway through there is a visual gag involving bodily functions that is so revolting, so unexpected and so genius that it comes close to them.

For a moment, I was transported back to the mix of delight and disgust I felt upon watching a ‘90s Farrelly Brothers movie when I was far too young: How is this allowed? Described as an “earnest-dipshits-on-the-road screwball comedy” by director Macon Blair ( I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore , The Toxic Avenger), this R-rated indie comedy can’t entirely deliver on that enticingly deranged promise, but it has enough testosterone-fueled transgression to make its runtime breeze by.

Dave Franco plays Mark, a doofus with a neck tattoo who expresses affection for his fellow man by slapping them on the jowls.

When he is invited to vacate his job at a call center – which he has been coasting through by playing gory video games and sneaking shots of whiskey at his desk – he teams up with with Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr) for a dodgy under-the-table job involving transporting wayward teens to rehab.

Their first charge is Sheridan (Mason Thames), a moody influencer who has made a name for himself by playing cruel stunts on members of the public like an off-brand Jake Paul.

Like Harold & Kumar before it, the road trip is an obvious but effective ruse for Idiots’s freeform, THC-addled approach to storytelling which finds the trio jumping from country diner to crummy motel to a Slavic granny’s living room as Sheridan attempts to derail his passage to rehab.

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