“Idiots” is a buddy comedy with raunchy promise, funny players and no pace. I mean NONE.

If this was “Midnight Run,” which it resembles, it’d be “Midnight Stroll.” If it was “The Last Detail,” which also figures in its plotting, they’d have to title it “The Next to Last Detail, The Last Detail, And Then Some.”

Pairing up Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson, Jr. — Ice Cube’s kid — as two losers who take on transporting a sociopathic, substance abusing rich kid to “rehab” pays some dividends, even if Jackson could use some “testy/funny straight man” lessons from his dad, a buddy picture veteran.

But scenes, even the ones with comic shock value, drift on past their payoff. And some don’t pay off at all. Many a comedy has gotten by on “hit and miss,” but this one whiffs a few too many times to delight.

Davis (Jackson) is a church going goof given to weeping. That happens when his pastor calls him to account for driving a church youth group to a porn film. It happens when that pastor (Killer Mike) fires him. Son, what did you think “NR, not rated” meant?

Mark (Franco, James Franco’s goofier brother) got canned from a call center job for giggling, drinking, smoking and goofing-off watching painful prank videos on his phone when he was supposed to be selling senior citizens things they don’t need.

Shady boss of many hustles Mrs. Dorindo (Grace Junot) hires Mark because he has a car and Davis has lost access to the church van he was going to use to haul often unwilling patients whom family members or guardians are committing to rehab.

Sure, the car’s an aged Buick Century with almost as much Bondo as paint showing. But it’ll get them there. With luck.

Sure, Mark spent the afternoon he got fired on a drug buying/abusing bender himself. But this is just “a frightened and confused child,” Davis wants to believe they’re transporting. What could go wrong?

Mason Thames of the “Black Phone” thrillers is well-cast as Sheridan — “Sherry” to his online fans — an heir with an air of sullen entitlement and a teen so out of control his parents have their attorney (Lee Eddy) commit him rather than evict him from their mansion themselves.

Sheridan’s an influencer in all the worst ways — social media-shared binges, stunts that hurt others. And being moptopped, rich, thin and pale white, he’s catnip to the teen and tween girls who follow him online.

He’s also a master manipulator, getting in his drivers’ heads, “dosing” one who isn’t already down to dose, foiling their plans to drive him across Virginia to a place where he can “get some help.”

Kiernan Shipka plays an Eastern European “private dancer” lured to a motel they check into. She’ll need her wizened granny’s (Lynn Wanlass) intervention to get out of this. Najah Bradley and Nicholas Braun are wacky psychopaths led by mastermind Koko (Peter Dinklage) into “intervening” in Sherry’s delivery to rehab.

There ae a lot of promising or potentially promising characters and situations thrown in this comic quest’s path. But the narrative has a stumbling, lurching quality that interrupts the flow — the build-up towards big laughs — even if pays off in keeping the viewer wrong-footed about where things might go next.

Franco’s a guaranteed laugh, and Dinklage shows up late and pretty much steals the movie. Others in the cast struggle with accents, reactions, pratfalls and punchlines that are directed and edited into sequences and gags that never quite get there.

Writer’director Blair, who did the recent “Toxic Avenger” reboot, never settles on a tone or how he feels about his “villain.” Unsavory characters float around the fringe of the story, are set up to join the pursuit of the punk and his “captors,” but are then forgotten.

And reminding us this “frightened confused child” has real victims and not knowing what to do with them once you’ve introduced them is a real buzzkill.

Rating: R, bloody violence, drug abuse, scatological humor, “sexual content” and profanity

Cast: Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson, Jr., Mason Thames, Grace Junot, Kiernan Shipka, Najah Bradley, Melanie Loren and Peter Dinklage.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Macon Blair. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:38