For 26 years, Jackass has been the ultimate avant-garde prankster inanity, serving up gonzo performance-art madness with the glee of a reckless teenager high on whippets.
It’s the king of the juvenile hill, and it goes out with a sledgehammer to the crotch with Jackass: Best and Last (June 26, in theaters), a commemorative big-screen farewell that blends new and old material.
Not the series’ high point but nonetheless a deliriously puerile swan song for Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of mischief-makers, it proves that nothing is eternal except the hilarity of seeing others hurt themselves for our amusement.
Jackass is coming to a close because, at age 55, Knoxville can no longer endure the bodily punishment that made him a star—the turning point being a concussive tussle with a raging bull in 2022’s Jackass Forever. Still, he’s front and center in Jackass: Best and Last, serving as the MC of more wild and wacko nonsense. The effusive laughter that greets each of these stunts by Knoxville and his buddies (whether they’re on camera or behind the scenes at director Jeff Tremaine’s monitor) is infectious. Moreover, it’s central to the franchise’s appeal, which has always been rooted in the shared experience of witnessing friends push the boundaries of physical danger—and good taste—to elicit impressed chuckles from their compatriots.
In that regard, Jackass: Best and Last is the culmination of a quarter-century-long project about friendship (with its mates bonded by outrageous trials by fire) and a celebration of youth, bravery, idiocy, and base immaturity.
There’s nothing more appealing to these clowns (Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Dave England, “Danger Ehren” McGhehey, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, Preston Lacy, Zach Holmes, and Jasper Dolphin) than hurling their bodies into things, tangling with hazardous animals, and being smacked, kicked, tased, electrocuted, and shot. The last of those is the subject of a seminal unaired scene—in which Knoxville, wearing a Kevlar vest, blasts himself with a .38 pistol—that MTV refused to broadcast in 1998. Fit for 12-year-old boys, it’s lunacy amplified to borderline-dadaist extremes.
There are two additional gags in Jackass: Best and Last that never made it to television: one featuring Knoxville trying, in a prison jumpsuit, to buy a hacksaw at a hardware store, and the other detailing his tumble down a flight of stairs while inside a cardboard box stuffed with pillows. That the second of these was deemed too imitable by MTV underlines that there were some apparent limits placed on these renegades by the powers-that-be.
As evidenced by those bits’ inclusion here, however, those shackles no longer exist, and there’s a nostalgic thrill to revisiting the young Knoxville and his cohorts risking life and limb for no reason other than adolescent thrills.
Hewing to convention, Jackass: Best and Last has a massive anal fixation, such that a psychologist could have a field day analyzing these men’s obsessions with their rear ends and the nastiness they excrete. In a squirm-inducing opener, the reliably game Steve-O gets a prostate exam from a robot whose large finger is coated, for added grossness, in chunky peanut butter. It’s not the last digit to disappear up a rear end in Tremaine’s latest, and that new action is married to kindred well-known clips, be it the late Ryan Dunn shoving a toy car up his rectum and then getting professional X-rays taken (cue priceless reaction shots from the physician and his staff), or Steve-O going for a ride in a bungee cord-throttled porta potty that coats him in excrement.
If backsides are a constant focus of Jackass: Best and Last, they’re not its only recurring subject. Penis-related pain takes center stage at several points along this ridiculous journey, as when England is repeatedly kicked in the crotch by a conveyor-belt torture device that boasts a spinning wheel outfitted with giant boots.
Newer group member Sean “Poopies” McInerney gets similar treatment when he’s tasked with walking along a balance beam as Knoxville uses a remote control to deliver electric shocks to his member. Childish inanity leading to cringeworthy agony is the lifeblood of these proceedings, and even now, the troupe takes immense delight in watching each other endure gauntlets that are as loopy as they are scary.
Having been fired during the making of Jackass Forever, star Bam Margera appears in both outtakes from that prior film and old footage (often with Dunn) that lends Jackass: Best and Last a wistfulness which underscores the real human cost of this undertaking.
Even so, melancholy rarely interferes with the joy of revisiting past classics (such as “High Five,” in which unsuspecting individuals are walloped by a giant hand) and cackling at novel nuttiness like “Office Party,” a dim-witted joke that finds Knoxville, the perpetually nude and/or costumed Pontius, and Dolphin hanging out in a room with a rampaging ram.
Jackass has always reveled in lowest-common-denominator absurdity, and its big-screen goodbye continues that tradition. Though Jackass: Best and Last doesn’t produce a classic gem à la Knoxville attending a Black male strip club disguised as his bad grandpa alter ego (which is replayed here), it maintains the series’ go-for-broke spirit right to the end, when everyone piles into a giant shopping cart and speeds down a desert road lined with dirt cannons and massive explosions.
In that climax, as in the wittily conceptual introduction, it achieves a blissful measure of controlled chaos that epitomizes the franchise’s inimitable personality.
On multiple occasions in Jackass: Best and Last, Knoxville gets choked up about the end of this wild era, and his sorrow is rendered genuine by the surrounding scenes of him, Pontius, Steve-O, and the rest having a howlingly great time concocting imaginative ways to put themselves through the wringer.
A closing-credits greatest-hits package set to Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” has the feel of a eulogy at the same time that it hints at the possibility (however slim) of a return engagement. Whether that materializes will no doubt be determined by how much Knoxville misses indulging in his trademark mayhem. Regardless, though, this supposedly final outing is a reminder that, when done properly, stupidity can be art.
