Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is back from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s grand finale out in Park City. He’s still very busy, with more reviews coming this week. Check out our preview of the 2026 festival; keep it locked to our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
A buddy comedy is a lot like baking a soufflé: It’s easy to get all the right ingredients together, but if the cook doesn’t know what they’re doing, it’s hard to make it rise. Lucky for all of us, Macon Blair’s got some Michelin stars. I don’t feel at home in this world anymore didn’t land for me as well as it did with others, but it was still a very solid debut (one doesn’t win the top prize at Sundance without some bona fide audience engagement), and The Toxic Avenger somehow found a big audience despite years of being caught in limbo (and even paid off a bunch of people’s medical debt in the process). The Shitheads is a kind of synthesis of these forms, with good chemistry between the compelling leads, a gross-out comic sensibility, and a weird-ass turn by Peter Dinklage. It feels like a good major label debut, a Nevermind or Goo with more shit jokes and crazy comic asides, spotlighting the moment where the artist takes a step towards the mainstream without totally compromising their ethos. Comparisons to Midnight Run are on point, and this movie is just absurdly funny.
The “shitheads” of the title refer to Davis (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) and Mark (Dave Franco), a pair of down-on-their-luck morons who dead-ended their way into a job delivering rich kids to treatment centers. It’s babysitting and bounty-hunting all in one package, assigned to them by a shady insurance/bail company, paid for by the kids’ parents who have normally fucked off to Aspen or the Alps while their child is going through the court system. Davis is the true believer, a guy so pious and dumb that, as shown in the opening sequence, he got fired from his last job at a church by taking some kids to a movie he thought was religious but was, in fact, Von Trier’s Antichrist. Losing that gig meant losing access to the transport van he used for his other “childcare” job, and, at first, Mark’s arrival looks like a bit of a blessing. He’s in the same boat, laid off as well, and owns a pretty shitty sedan. On the other hand, he’s a devil-may-care drug enthusiast, whose tinges of conscience are the only things keeping him from being labeled a sociopath. They butt heads almost immediately — Davis thinks Mark’s a nutty loose cannon, and Mark thinks Davis is a wimpy, tear-stained loser. Both are somewhat right, but, hey, all they gotta do is drive, right?
Wrong. Sheridan Kimberley (Mason Thames) has other plans for them. He isn’t the kind of kid that Davis is used to dealing with — he’s expecting a tortured, emotionally neglected son of privilege, and what he gets is a high school-aged Jack Doherty. He’s a social media star, a “legend” in the eyes of those around him who follow his exploits on the internet, who is being sent to treatment by a court for setting a homeless guy on fire. They find this out a bit too late, after Mark sprains his ankle (he tried to do a tough-guy act and chase the kid down during a half-hearted escape attempt), they blow a tire, and are forced to pull over for the night. It’s in that shitty motel, mostly booked up by a grocer’s industry convention, where Sheridan makes his play, exploiting what little information he’s learned about the two to engineer a proper escape attempt. He plays the pathetic penitent possum to get on Davis’ side while poking at their egos, and drugs them both with Mark’s stash of dark-web psychedelics. That’s when he ropes in a small-town exotic dancer (Kiernan Shipka), steals her cash, and leaves the three of them to clean up the (literal) mess. Clock’s ticking — they’ve gotta get him back and to the center before the clock runs out, and deal with whatever crazy shit Sheridan cooks up in the meantime to try another escape attempt.
So, you can probably see where the Midnight Run comparisons come from. Like Martin Brest, Blair has a keen sense of character dynamics and how to use them for maximum payoff, exponentially increasing the ludicrousness of each scene in an organic, justified way. Jackson and Franco are perfectly cast as a pair of opposed personalities, with each’s natural on-screen temperament pushed to extremes. As seen in the Den of Thieves films, the former’s cool under pressure, with a little bit of goofy world-weariness as glimpsed in Ingrid Goes West, and his casting as a would-be youth preacher, perpetually calm and patient (until he can’t be), isn’t a difficult stretch. Likewise, Franco’s in pure Neighbors mode, leaning into a similar sweat-stained sense of chaotic-neutral party-boy craziness exacerbated by being put in a position of authority and tasked with taking care of someone much more diabolical than he is. They’re often at each other’s throats until they realize just how far up shit creek they are and how far back any paddle is, and it’s wonderfully funny to watch them try to swim against the current.
Likewise, Thames is a wonderful instigator. His neutral expressions are hard to read, and he’s almost as good at conning the audience into believing his bullshit as he is with his caretakers. Sheridan’s a perfect antagonist for a film like this, with enough wily creativity and intelligence to ensure that each escape attempt is more ridiculous than the last. Still, he’s not smart enough to look two moves ahead and realize how bad a situation he’s put himself in. The whole third act is a serving of just desserts consequences, where a misguided attempt to mobilize his online fans to action ends with him tied up in an attic as Nicholas Braun plays werewolf-themed mumble rap and gets into his hypermasculine fursona for the rich kid’s approval. It’s sort of taken for granted that this kid really won’t face consequences for his actions, and he’s virtually incapable of growth, but that doesn’t mean that everyone around him is in the same boat. Blair’s able to bring all of this wackiness to a satisfying conclusion, even if that whole “the journey, not the destination” cliché applies.
What will stick with you are the laughs, from Jackson’s drug-fueled interactions with the motel manager and eventual eruption at Thames’ character, to Franco’s bluster and queasy stomach, to Braun and Dinklage’s characters’ circumstances and schemes. I know better than to predict hits from a Sundance line-up, but I hope The Shitheads gets a wide release and finds more doofuses like myself to cackle at its antics. It may have just been the Park City air, but man, it was hard to breathe after laughing so hard after this one.