Macon Blair returns to the Sundance Film Festival in full chaos mode with The Shitheads. It opens with a hilarious sequence in which idiotic but well-meaning pushover Davis Hutch (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) is fired from his job at a Presbyterian church after taking his youth group to a screening of an unrated movie (Lars von Trier’s Antichrist). The gag lands immediately, the perfect setup to a classic dick (dong) joke, and a clear warning that Blair has no intention of holding back.
After his spectacular firing, Davis accepts a job transporting a spoiled billionaire’s son (Mason Thames) to court-ordered rehab, teaming up with a washed-up junkie played by Dave Franco. Predictably, everything goes to shit. Literally. What follows is a messy, darkly comic road trip that feels ripped straight from the era of early-2000s R-rated comedies, where gross-out gags and escalation are king. Blair seems intent on seeing just how much chaos he can cram into his script—and for a while, the sheer audacity of it works.
Jackson Jr. and Franco make for a fun, loose duo, riffing off each other with an easy chemistry that carries much of the film’s early momentum. Rising star, Mason Thames continues to impress, leaning into a darker turn as the trust-fund menace at the story’s center, embodying a brand of privilege that feels both exaggerated and uncomfortably familiar. Kiernan Shipka is a standout as well, injecting genuine heart into what is otherwise a fairly shallow narrative. And Nicholas Braun’s sleazy lycan rapper—yes, really—is sheer nightmare fuel, somehow managing to eclipse even an exploding shit gag.
As funny as The Shitheads can be, it doesn’t take long for its limitations to become clear. By the third act, the film veers into an aggressively bleak tonal register that clashes with its cartoonish comedy. Blair flirts with a broader critique of a social order in which wealth protects moral failure at the expense of working-class lives, but the movie seems far more interested in landing the next outrageous joke than in developing that idea. The result is something thematically muddled, with extreme tonal swings that struggle to balance absurdity and darkness.
The problem isn’t a lack of commitment, but too much of it in too many directions. The relentless over-the-top energy eventually begins to wear thin, and nearly every character is an unhinged wacko, leaving little to latch onto emotionally—perhaps the point, given the film’s title, but still exhausting. The Shitheads remains a messy good time, and there’s no denying its crowd-pleasing laughs. I was laughing along in the beginning; by the end, though, I was ready for this road trip to be over.
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