The Shitheads: Failure as Starting Point

Macon Blair's The Shitheads announces itself with title and intent: this is cinema willing to treat failure and the criminal underclasses with the same attention cinema usually reserves for the ambitious. Dave Franco and O'Shea Jackson Jr. play Mark and Davis, two unqualified drivers tasked with transporting a troubled teenager to a rehabilitation facility through a shady service. What unfolds is a chaotic road trip where the specific competencies required for criminality prove entirely absent.

The central tension is simple: these men aren't particularly good at what they're attempting. They lack the discipline of professional criminals, the ruthlessness, the forward planning. They improvise, react, stumble from one complication into worse ones. They're motivated less by conviction than by the grinding necessity of staying afloat in economic circumstances that offer minimal legitimate paths. This is the particular American desperation of underemployment transformed into micro-criminality.

Cinematographer Guillermo Garza photographs the road with the precision of someone documenting landscape as character. The motels, highways, gas stations, and backroads aren't merely setting. They're the material conditions within which Mark and Davis exist. Garza's color palette—washed out, slightly desaturated, occasionally punctuated by garish neon—creates an aesthetic that feels simultaneously real and hallucinatory. The camera lingers on small failures: a car that won't start at the crucial moment, a cheap motel room containing years of accumulated desolation.

Franco brings hapless sincerity to Mark, a man clearly in over his head yet convinced that good intentions excuse insufficient capability. His face registers constant low-level panic beneath surface efforts at confidence. He's not malicious. He's inadequate to the situation. Jackson Jr.'s Davis is the chaos agent—more willing to embrace the criminality, more comfortable with violence, yet possessed of the same fundamental incompetence that defines Mark. Their scenes achieve genuine comedic resonance not because of witty dialogue but because of the authentic awkwardness of two people attempting a crime neither should be committing.

Mason Thames, as the troubled teenager, provides moral center that becomes increasingly complicated. He's younger than Mark and Davis, clearly damaged, yet simultaneously more adult in his resignation. The relationship between the drivers and their cargo generates much of the film's emotional complexity—they're meant to be authority figures but increasingly appear as fellow travelers in failure.

Peter Dinklage appears late as a figure of established criminality, someone who actually possesses the competencies Mark and Davis lack. Yet rather than transforming them, his presence emphasizes how much they remain outside the professional criminal world. Blair's script understands something essential: criminality requires infrastructure and connection that poverty ensures most people will never access. His characters aren't antiheroes. They're people doing the only thing they can think of and failing at it anyway.

The critical split is predictable—some find it one of the funniest buddy comedies of the season, others find it uneven, uncertain whether Blair intends comedy or tragedy. The film is indeed formally inconsistent. Yet this unevenness feels intentional. The world of petty crime and desperate improvisation doesn't maintain tonal consistency either.

What Blair proposes is radical in its simplicity: these characters deserve witnessing because of their failures, not despite them. The Shitheads is a road movie about people driving toward nothing in particular, failing with the authenticity of those with no actual alternative.