‘The Shitheads’ Review: Macon Blair Merges ‘The Last Detail’ with ‘Road Trip’ in a Wildly Uneven Comedy That Fails to Find Its Own Lane

In the first scene of Macon Blair’s “The Shitheads,” a God-loving striver named Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) gets fired from his job at a presbyterian church for taking the congregation’s youth group to a screening of Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist.” He had been under the impression that it was an educational film about the life of Jesus. Why, his boss wonders, didn’t he leave after Willem Dafoe’s “dong” got smashed with a giant block of wood? (Or, you know, a long time before that?). Just how often are there mid-day rep screenings of “Antichrist” in suburban Atlanta, anyway? And in what universe would the mega-millionaire parents of a malevolent teen like Sheridan Foxworth Kimberly (a hyper-punchable Mason Thames, excellent as a pointier young Jessie Eisenberg in pure evil mode) hire a fuck-up like Davis to drive their kid to the rehab center on the other side of the state?   

These are just a few of the many different questions that go unanswered over the course of a wild — and wildly uneven — comedy that attempts to split the difference between “Road Trip” and “The Last Detail” without capitulating to the fact that each of those masterpieces belongs to a wholly separate reality. To be clear, I would never begrudge Blair for wanting to set a movie called “The Shitheads” in the non-existent overlap of the Venn diagram between them; the “I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore” director has previously displayed a rare knack for using outsized situations to highlight the raw indignities of modern American life, and I have to respect the less successful attempt to do so again here. 

Blair has never flinched away from the subhuman treatment of America’s working class (see: “Toxic Avenger, The”), and “The Shitheads” is at its best whenever it hones in on honest people who are just trying to do the best they can in the face of a country that couldn’t possibly care any less. Or, for that matter, honest people who are just loudly watching drunk people fight each other on YouTube during the middle of their shift at a debt collection agency. Mark (Dave Franco, once again proving his genius for playing unbothered scumbag) was about to get laid off anyway as part of his company’s pivot to not paying people, but that little incident helps to expedite the process. It also frees Mark to help Davis chauffeur Sheridan to rehab, as the two strangers — like all great teams — are recommended to each other by their mutual drug dealer (Blair). 

And so the world’s least qualified transportation team rolls up to Sheridan’s parents’ mansion in Mark’s beat-up red sedan, completely unprepared for the ride of their lives. Davis is a sweet-natured idiot who wants to do good with his life. Mark, basically a more aggro and demented version of the character Franco’s brother played in “Pineapple Express,” is a less sweet-natured idiot who wants to do the glorified gas station drugs he’s packed into his pockets for the drive. Sheridan, meanwhile, is the antichrist who Lars von Trier foretold, and — as becomes violently clear after he bites and robs the Eastern European stripper (a flinty Kiernan Shipka as Irina) he convinces Mark to call to their motel room — neither of his temporary legal minders are at all prepared for the full extent of his spoiled brat sociopathy. 

From that point on, “The Shitheads” becomes a meandering and recursive journey to wherever (how far away is this rehab center anyway?) as Sheridan’s antics effectively convince all of the workaday people in his path to fight each other for table scraps while he laughs at them from the backseat of Mark’s car. There’s a handful of malicious druggings, a half-naked fight against a gaggle of Sheridan’s dad’s business associates (who are attending a convention at a rundown motel?), and later an encounter with some wannabe kidnappers whose members include Peter Dinklage in zombie makeup and a spectacularly committed Nicholas Braun as a lycan-obsessed Soundcloud rapper who calls himself “Pricka Bush Da Werewoof.” 

A smattering of individual moments achieve the kind of madcap insanity that a movie like this needs for momentum, but “The Shitheads” is plagued by stop-and-start plotting that does more to stifle its energy than build to it, and its complete disinterest in meaningfully developing the relationship between Mark and Davis makes it hard to feel like this road trip is going anywhere — not that we ever really know where it’s supposed to be going in the first place. It’s a credit to Blair’s script that Sheridan doesn’t seem to learn anything from this misadventure, which would have been fatal to a film that’s only held together by its enduring fascination with how some people choose to retain their decency in a world that rewards the opposite, but he never seems to be much of a real person either, and the shred of humanity the movie wants you to see in him sucks the life out of things just when the story’s chaos is peaking. 

That speaks to the biggest problem with “The Shitheads,” which is that its gap between credibility and comic license is way too wide for Blair to bridge. Despite featuring one of the greatest eruptions of explosive diarrhea in the proud history of motion pictures (it’s so good), “The Shitheads” isn’t funny enough to earn its heightened cruelties, and — that incredible jet stream of liquid poop notwithstanding, along with a small handful of other memorable highlights — its cruelties aren’t heightened enough to justify how little sense they make. In that sense at least, Blair’s latest movie doesn’t feel at home in this world anymore. 

Grade: C+

“The Shitheads” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.