The stoner buddy comedy is an American institution at this point. Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, Pineapple Express, even the recent Kristen Stewart/Alia Shawkat movie The Wrong Girls — get two friends high, send them on an adventure, and laughs will surely ensue. Idiots (originally titled The Shitheads) is kind of one of these movies. The style of humor is the same, for sure. But only one of these guys is a stoner. And they’re not exactly friends, either.
No, Mark (Dave Franco) and Davis (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) are colleagues — and even that’s a generous word, given the makeshift nature of their employment. Idiots sets up both of them by showing each of them getting fired from separate jobs (Davis because he took a church group to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist), then brings them together for a tenuous gig escorting troubled teens to rehab in Mark’s beat-up sedan. Why have these goofballs been entrusted with this sensitive task without any training or even a background check? Don’t worry about it.
