Half of a writing-and-directing pair with Jonathan Goldstein, Daley writes comedies about ordinary people in over their heads, and he is at his best when the stakes stay human-sized.
Fi1m perspective
The John Francis Daley scene is a small one. Five people bicker in a graveyard about a plan none of them is equipped to carry out. In Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023) the sorcerer cannot make a spell work when anyone is watching, and Justice Smith plays the nerves rather than the jokes, which is why the jokes land. The plot is too big for the people in it, and that gap is where Daley's comedy lives.
He has never worked alone. Daley was a child actor first and began writing with Jonathan Goldstein around 2007; their first produced screenplay was Horrible Bosses (2011), and the pair have not been apart since. They moved to directing with Vacation (2015), a revival of the National Lampoon series that drew mixed notices, then Game Night (2018), a comedy about ordinary people caught in a plot too big for them. Between the two came a screenplay credit, shared with several others, on Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017).
We liked Homecoming well enough, and its best stretch is the school comedy, with Tom Holland as a Peter Parker who is late for everything, which is plainly the register Daley and Goldstein were hired for. How much of it is theirs we cannot say; the writing credit is crowded and the film belongs to Jon Watts. What we can say is that its action gets murkier the higher it climbs, and the same is true of Honour Among Thieves. The crew scenes are a pleasure. The fights are loud, grey and long, and by the last act the film we had been enjoying has been swapped for a bigger and worse one.
We laughed, properly, at five people bickering in a graveyard in Honour Among Thieves, because the film is fond of the game rather than solemn about it and lets the crew, not the setting, be the joke. That is the pair's method when it works: the premise is absurd and the people inside it are not. Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez are given an ease together that most screen pairs never manage, and the script never turns them into a couple, which is the kind of restraint a lesser comedy would not have bothered with. What the films lack, on the evidence we have, is a danger we believe in between the jokes; The Princess Bride managed both in the same scene, and Daley and Goldstein have so far managed one at a time.
The pair are credited on Mayday (2026). We would like it to be small. Everything they have made gets better the closer it gets to a table with five people around it, and worse the nearer it gets to the sky.
Biography
John Francis Daley is an American writer, director and actor. Born on 20 July 1985 in Wheeling, Illinois, he began his career as a child actor, appearing in the national tour of The Who's Tommy and gaining prominence as Sam Weir in the NBC series Freaks and Geeks (1999–2000). He later played Dr Lance Sweets in Bones (2005–2014).
Daley is best known for his long-running writing and directing partnership with Jonathan Goldstein. Their collaborations include the screenplays for Horrible Bosses (2011), The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013) and Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), and they made their directorial debuts with Vacation (2015). They co-directed Game Night (2018) and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), on which Daley also received screenplay credit.
