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***/**** starring Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Jason Acuña directed by Jeff Tremaine
by Angelo Muredda “Did we get it, Jeff?” a battered Johnny Knoxville, reviving after a run-in with a bull that gave him a brain hemorrhage, mutters to director Jeff Tremaine late in Jackass Forever, the penultimate entry in the bawdy series. The Jackass ringleader, who’s gone from puckish to avuncular over the twenty-some years of the franchise, revisits the stunt that nearly killed him in Jackass: Best and Last, where we learn that the goring we saw was actually the second take, after the first lacked a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. The behind-the-scenes commentary and B-roll about Knoxville’s commitment to the bit–which echoes a moment from Jackass Number Two where he convinces himself to go through with a stunt by saying it’s “just footage”–raise a fundamental question about the series’ miraculous 25-year run: Are Knoxville and the gang merely mining their bodies for views, like forefathers to the content-pilled influencers of today, or are they putting their bodies on the line for their art like consummate performers? And does it matter if they’re going the distance to give us a good time?
The laugh quotient of the fifth and, as Knoxville tearfully insists more than once, final Jackass film is a bit lower than usual, due to the recycled footage that comprises nearly half the runtime, but it’s made up for by the pathos that’s been creeping into the series since the archival montage of the boys in their salad days at the end of Jackass 3D. Even more so than its already valedictory predecessor, the first since Ryan Dunn’s death, and which featured the men earnestly telling one another “I love you” after segments like they were seeing each other for the last time, Jackass: Best and Last is a kind of living funeral for a genre-bending franchise that can accommodate forms as disparate as hangout movie, extreme sports doc, Busby Berkeley musical, and both slapstick and scatological comedy. It’s a celebration of life for the mostly surviving members of the troupe, as well as a toast to the departed Dunn and the estranged Bam Margera, who was fired in the course of filming Jackass Forever, and who briefly appears in a mix of familiar and previously unseen clips.
Despite the pervasive end-of-days vibe, the freewheeling structure of prior entries is more or less maintained, with Knoxville and company introducing new bits of genital mutilation, light torture, and toilet humour. Additionally, documentary interstitials of the troupe hanging out on the set find them reminiscing about the craziest things they’ve pulled off, prompting clips from the earlier films. These clips, pleasant but a bit too numerous, span gags like Dunn inserting a toy car in his anus for an x-ray in Jackass: The Movie to the Silence of the Lambs bit from Jackass Forever, where members of the gang are lured into a pitch-black room and pelted and prodded with objects while filmed in night vision, all while the group’s proudest exhibitionist, Chris Pontius, dances naked in the corner like Buffalo Bill, mostly for the viewer’s benefit since no one else can see him. This walk down memory lane is pleasant enough, and there’s something of the time-stamped quality of Michael Apted’s Up movies in returning to the men’s unusual character-actor faces and decidedly un-Hollywood naked bodies at fixed points over such a long period, but the nostalgia runs counter to the generational baton-passing of Jackass Forever, which introduced new members like Poopies, Zach Holmes, Dark Shark, and Rachel Wolfson, all of whom, with the exception of Poopies (once again suffering any number of indignities of the flesh), are mostly sidelined in favour of the old stalwarts.
If the old stuff is a little tired, the best of the new is still life-affirming in the idiosyncratically Jackass way, the sense of just getting away with a heist as palpable as ever. It’s telling that the most striking backlogged material is the formerly apocryphal clip that opens the film: a low-rent video audition Knoxville produced as a proof of concept for the MTV series, where he tests a dirt-cheap bulletproof vest by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver–the catch being that neither he nor the viewer knows which round in the chamber is loaded until it goes off. “I was kind of scared,” he admits after pulling it off without a hitch, setting the tone for a mortality-haunted comedy about the anxieties of getting older, aging out of your job, and losing your friends. Some of the funniest gags involve the common bodily indignities of old age, from prostate exams–performed on Steve-O by a robot that applies crunchy peanut butter as lubricant to its sharp fingers–to colonoscopies, with laxative prep fluid used to prime the group’s intestines ahead of an explosive game of Twister.
Apart from the typically ingenious opening number, a Jamiroquai-esque screwball dance sequence in a brightly lit, space-age hangar with booby-trapped walls and trick floors, the most satisfying bit is saved for last. It’s a recreation of Jackass: The Movie‘s opening shopping-cart stunt, with the surviving cast barreling through the desert and dodging explosions in their age-ravaged figures. This time, they go over a cliff and plunge to their ostensible deaths, losing life and limb as they land in a ravine, their fall triggering further pyrotechnics so that they go out like Daniel Craig’s really, truly, unambiguously dead James Bond at the end of No Time to Die. Then, we pull back to see the cast alive and well, taking in the sight of the identically dressed, maimed puppets that served as their stunt doubles. No longer willing to get the shot at all costs, the middle-aged Knoxville steps away from his stunt doppelgänger, its lifeless body a metonym for the end of Jackass–dead so that its cast might live on with whatever is left of their bodies.
