Nine long years ago, the filmmaker Macon Blair won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for his film I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, a strange little thriller-comedy that, despite its festival accolades, mostly disappeared when it landed on Netflix. After a venture into I.P. with 2023’s The Toxic Avenger, Blair is back at Sundance with another curious, tonally erratic thriller-comedy, The Shitheads.
Initially, the film is as off-putting as its title. O’Shea Jackson Jr. plays Davis, a devout, well-meaning, but bumbling guy who works part time ferrying troubled youth to various rehabilitation centers, taking legal responsibility for their safety for the duration of the trip. He’s been assigned a new partner, Mark, a drug-addled slacker played with antic energy by Dave Franco. As these two screw-ups are introduced to one another, Blair tries to set up an amusing odd-couple rapport; Davis is kind and serious, Mark is brash and rude and thinks everything is a stupid joke. But the intended chemistry doesn’t catch. The first 20 or so minutes of The Shitheads are an arduous sit, as these two talented actors work very hard, in vain, to get some lively energy going.
The Shitheads
A movie that’s way better than its first impression.
The guys’ first client, I guess you could call him, is a badly behaved rich boy named Sheridan (Mason Thames, a long way from How to Train Your Dragon; and from Regretting You, for that matter), who at first seems to be a run-of-the-mill entitled brat. He’s corralled into Mark’s car and off this threesome journeys across the Georgia countryside.
Blair seems to be setting up an awfully familiar plot, or a combination of hoary tropes: the zany road trip and the guy-saddled-with-an-unruly-kid story. In some ways, that is indeed exactly what Blair is doing. But he’s an odd filmmaker; his writing is at once crass and graceful, his plotting hard to predict. Blair also enjoys detours into filth and scuzz (as his Toxic Avenger past would suggest), which add further unpleasantness to the strained, acrid dynamic he’s built for Jackson and Franco. I sat there watching The Shitheads, my last film at Sundance this year, and longed for it to end so I could go back to my condo and write a quick pan.
But as The Shitheads rambles into its second act, the film develops a magnetic pull. Jackson and Franco settle into their performances (Jackson is especially nuanced and surprising), just as Sheridan is revealed to be a far tricksier, more complicated, more dangerous figure than initially assumed. Blair keeps the strange comedy coming, but he also lets the film dip into moments of contemplative thought, into hardscrabble philosophy. The Shitheads simply becomes a far more interesting film — a suspenseful one, too.
Sheridan, it turns out, is something of a social-media anarchist, a proudly unprincipled devotee to his own id who stages cruel stunts online and does heinous things in his private life. He’s got a legion of fans and seemingly no morals, which raises and mutates the stakes of the film in intriguing ways. Thames seems to revel in the chance to grimy up his image. Blair, meanwhile, regards Sheridan with an appropriate amount of horror; the film subtly uses this one rich sociopath to gesture toward, or diffusely evoke, all the rich sociopaths currently running rampant across the world, many of them stoked on by the depraved urgings of the internet.
Eventually, The Shitheads becomes a movie about what, if any, responsibility regular people have to one another, to common decency, to compassion. It’s surprisingly heady stuff, even if it’s only suggested in the margins of the film. At the center of the frame is more of Blair’s aggressive, spiky quirk, the bulk of which arrives in the form of a band of opportunistic Sheridan fans, played by Peter Dinklage, Najah Bradley and a face-tatted, teeth-grilled, hair-braided Nicholas Braun. The cartoonishness of these characters is offset by a genuine menace, which adds notes of loopy dread to Blair’s already plenty busy picture.
Elsewhere, Kiernan Shipka shows up as a Slavic (I think?) stripper who has common cause with the guys for a few scenes, while the rapper Killer Mike does a brief but shining turn as a frustrated pastor. The entire film is eclectically populated, which can feel a little gimmicky or mannered, until Blair uses these interesting people with interesting faces to humanize the off-kilter world they live in. By the end of the film, I was quite enjoying spending some time with them, despite wanting so badly to flee the scene at the beginning of the film. I suppose that, once in a while, an acquired taste proves all the more satisfying.
