Macon Blair Waited 13 Years to Make Idiots — and the Payoff Is a Dumb and Dumber Callback That Goes Even Bigger

Macon Blair has a knack for incorporating offbeat comedy into his movies, from the neo-noir Coen Brothers-style I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017) to the splatstick superhero satire The Toxic Avenger (2023). Now, his third directorial feature, Idiots, sees the writer-director venturing into the buddy movie and road-trip comedy territories. Blair himself makes a cameo as D.D., the drug dealer his regular customer, Mark (Dave Franco), gets his fix from. His role may have been a small part. But he acts as a storytelling anchor between hooking Mark up for a job and selling him the potent “Citrus Diesel” liquid marijuana, which leads to one of the most hilariously chaotic set pieces in Idiots.

‘Idiots’ Escort Job Plot Is a Direct Homage to Midnight Run

But first, the job in question revolves around escorting a person – a wealthy, troubled teenager, to be exact – named Sheridan Kimberley (Mason Thames) from his parents’ luxurious estate to a rehab clinic via a transport service operated by Dorindo (Grace Junot). Blair cited Midnight Run as one of the core blueprints for his latest movie, which explains the fundamental similarities of an escort job from one destination to another. That Martin Brest’s 1988 buddy-comedy classic features bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) transporting the mob accountant nicknamed “The Duke” (Charles Grodin); a supposedly easy task turns into a cross-country journey of action-packed and comedic mayhem.

As Blair told IndieWire ahead of the film’s Sundance premiere, “We took inspiration from ‘Midnight Run’ and ‘The Last Detail’ and things like that.”

Whereas Jack is a professional who’s been doing this for some time, Blair chooses to subvert expectations by making Mark and Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) two hired guys who have no prior experience with the transport gig. These two lost their respective jobs: one’s a member of the church who got dismissed by the angry pastor for taking the youth group to watch Antichrist – yes, that Lars von Trier’s controversial arthouse film – after assuming it was both religious and educational. The other ends up fired for slacking off at his job, resulting in this pair of strangers becoming partners for the aforementioned work.

One of the successful elements that made Midnight Run such a beloved classic is the contrasting personalities between Jack and “The Duke”, both of whom don’t see things eye to eye but are forced to rely on each other. Here, Davis is a naïve and deeply religious “straight man” trying to make things right following the church disaster. He’s the one doing the driving – an old Red Buick Century, to be precise – and has to put up with Mark, who’s rather oblivious and tends to behave erratically.

It doesn’t help either when he brings along the drug, which could only mean nothing but trouble sooner or later. Like Midnight Run, the journey in Idiots is far from smooth sailing – one of which involves Mark, Davis, and Sheridan being forced to spend a night at a motel after the car suffers a flat tire.

What follows is a series of disastrous moments, beginning with Sheridan sneakily spiking Davis’s soda can with enough liquid marijuana from Mark’s stash to make his head spin in a psychedelic mode. Mark himself had already boosted his own soda with the same drug, and the fact that Sheridan manipulates him into calling an exotic dancer, played by Kiernan Shipka as Irina, to spice up the night doesn’t end well.

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‘Idiots’ Toilet Scene Is a Direct Callback to Dumb and Dumber

Blair isn’t just content with inspiring his Idiots from Midnight Run, since the movie also shares the same DNA with the Farrelly brothers’ 1994 gross-out comedy classic Dumb and Dumber. For a brief recap, Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) are two bumbling dimwits on a hilarious cross-country journey to return a briefcase belonging to a beautiful woman.

Their characteristics partly reflect Mark and Davis, the titular idiots who cause more trouble than they ever imagined. Idiots even take a cue from Dumb and Dumber’s infamous bathroom scene, the part where Harry ends up in a toilet suffering from massive diarrhea after consuming a drink heavily spiked with industrial-grade laxatives. The diarrhea part makes its way into this movie, specifically the graphic motel scene where the intoxicated Mark defecates himself while watching Irina perform an exotic dance.

Idiots had a long road to the screen: Blair first wrote the project in 2017 for Luke Wilson and Tracy Morgan to star in, and it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that it was rebuilt around Franco, Jackson Jr., and Thames.

First premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, when it originally carried the title The Shitheads (no, really), before it made its theatrical debut in the stateside on August 28.

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Idiots opens in South African cinemas on September 4, one week after its US theatrical release.