Director: Jeff Tremaine
Stars: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, and the whole rest of the gang
Synopsis: The fifth and final installment in the Jackass franchise sees the crew go on one last insane crusade.
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, what’s the word for going back to the well and willingly falling down the bore in the name of cinema? Thankfully for us, the Jackass troupe doesn’t need a hard and fast term nor a definition of any kind to make sense of the thing they’ve gleefully and perilously dedicated their lives to for the better part of three decades. Thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of swift blows to the genitals, and a handful of near-death experiences on, Johnny Knoxville and co. are best known and will forever be singularly remembered for voluntarily putting themselves in harm’s way for the sake of a laugh: Ours and one another’s. Questions regarding the stunt of the day tend to be few and far between. It’s better that way; some might even argue that it’s beautiful.
The last 30-ish years of escapades dreamed up by Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, et al. are best distilled down to a single idea by the tagline for their 2022 collection of (mis)deeds, Jackass Forever: “Some people never learn.” Flipping that statement around and directing at their eager audience lets it ring just as true. From its dawn as an MTV clip show in 2000 through its endless run of spinoff feature films and the many “0.5s” smattered in between, people (generally men) have delighted in watching Bam Margera fall into a pit of fake snakes only for a handful of real ones to be added moments after the initial misguided terror wore off; in seeing Jason “Wee-Man” Acuña convince multiple cast members that there definitely wasn’t a massive, hidden hand attached to a spring-powered pendulum around the corner from where they’d be walking, waiting to wallop them in the grill (“HIGH FIVE!”); or in enjoying insert cast member name here’s next (but never first) encounter with a bite-happy reptile. You need not rack your brain too much to imagine what these creatures are all too happy to bite, and these men are all too happy to let them. They pull these stunts over and over again, and yet as a viewing experience, Jackass never gets old.
But the Jackasses themselves have, and Jackass: Best and Last — the fifth and final installment, as has been proclaimed in the film’s marketing and is reiterated a few times on screen by cast and crew alike — doesn’t hesitate in acknowledging that fact. Its opening credits, a trademark performance in each entry that simultaneously introduces the cast and pummels them with blunt force, is a Jamiroquai-inspired “dance” number that doesn’t require the featured players to move all that much. (Helping matters is the “Virtual Insanity”-lite treadmill floor; a few participants don’t even have to walk in order to meet their makers.) The film’s opening bit is a robot-administered prostate exam; later comes a gag — emphasis on the gag — in which a handful of castmates chug the intolerable liquid one drinks to prepare for a colonoscopy and play a smelly game of “Twister.” Knoxville and longtime Jackass steward Jeff Tremaine discuss that “this is what Jackass looks like at 50,” only for that humorous sentiment to be later one-upped by the revelation that one more bull-inflicted head injury might just kill the face of the franchise. It’s all fun and games when somebody gets hurt. Not so much if someone dies.
And so while there’s plenty of new to be found here, including the still sorta new gaggle of young castmates (Zach Holmes, Sean “Poopies” McInerney, Jasper Dolphin, Eric Manaka, and Rachel Wolfson, who quite specifically gets nothing to do), Best and Last spends less time introducing skits and stunts into their everlasting arsenal of classic pranks than it does revisiting those those of films and episodes past. Some are shown in snippets, while others — like Forever’s “Silence of the Lambs,” 3D’s “Poo Cocktail Supreme,” and the “abduction” of Brad Pitt circa 2002 — are replayed in full, often with additional, unseen commentary thrown in for good measure. To use an aforementioned distinction, Best and Last would be safe to categorize as a “0.5,” the sort of “here’s what we left on the cutting room floor” films that the crew would typically release between new chapters with a slightly different tone and structure… insofar as a Jackass film holds to a specific structure, that is.
Like the installments to have come before it, Best and Last’s editing is limited to fade outs and fade ins between clips, a touch that always made the series feel undeniably homemade from a filmmaking perspective. (As if building a ramp and a slingshot designed to launch a man in a wheelbarrow into an inflatable pool isn’t “homemade” enough.) That persists here, though many of the on-cams chaps carry with them a somber tone, acknowledgements that this is, indeed, an ending. It being the ending may depend more on how much Paramount loves money, or cares to reinvent the procession for its streaming arm with “Poopies” and Jasper et al. as its stars. But those whippersnappers hardly carry with them the fervor for this sort of stuff that Chris Pontius has for swinging his penis in circles like a helicopter blade. Nor are they remotely as willing as their fearless leaders, particularly Knoxville, to step into the ring with a bull hellbent on cracking open its opponent’s skull. And who would (or could) be? It takes an especially sick person to appreciate crafting their own pain in order to make others laugh.
The gratitude this particular critic feels for these lunatics goes beyond the bounds of their balls and bullets taken. It has often been shared, albeit glibly, how beautiful Jackass is, a visual representation of a smattering of very unique, very male friendships locked together by a common insanity. But the series, from television to cinemas, has also spotlit the growth that its stars have experienced, with Best and Last perhaps offering the most concrete examples of development. Between archival and present-day footage, we watch Steve-O go from refusing to shove a toy car up his ass to the guy willing to take a robot’s finger instead. In other news, he’s gotten sober, and the crew has enforced on-set sobriety in order to ensure maximum safety while performing the dumbest shit imaginable. We’ve come a long way from the days when Knoxville [redacted] himself in the [redacted] with nothing but [redacted] as protection, a stunt that opens this new film and had never been seen before. (Unless, of course, you were really dying to see the truth to the many rumors of why Knoxville is the captain and found it on YouTube before it was taken down.)
We’ve come a long way from a lot in the context of Jackass, from when the majority of their crusades had to do with riding skateboards to now, when budgets are larger yet men are less capable of taking the same hits they once took. Best and Last’s new set pieces aren’t recycled but are underwhelming by comparison to the old days. Imagine a de-aged, stomping Robert De Niro in The Irishman that absolutely looks every year his actual age; that’s sort of what it’s like to watch how much time has aged our beloved boys out of what they’ve always been capable of.
What hasn’t changed is how much joy they find in their jobs, a crazy concept in and of itself that they take to levels unheard of prior. No longer are they the same 20-something warriors who challenged MTV to air “The Convict,” a bit in which Knoxville was actually threatened with an arrest after dressing up like an escaped prisoner and using a hardware store’s saw supply to rid himself of handcuffs, or literally took a dump in a different hardware store’s display toilets for shits and giggles. Now, they’re a bit more like us: Weathered from life on the exterior but young and dumb at heart. Jackass: Best and Last takes pride in the knowledge that it’s okay to move on and to revel in the glory days all at once, even if the glory days theoretically concluded long ago, six concussions and 19 broken limbs in the past. But they’ll never fully learn, no matter what certain medical professionals tell them to do, and likely never will. Thank goodness for that.
