The Last Jackass Claims To Be Their Best

Johnny Knoxville is about to cry, and it has nothing to do with being punched in the balls. All those hard-headed concussions must have made him a softie. “I’m sad,” says a wet-eyed Knoxville. “A big part of our life is almost over.” So far, he’s lived it like a man with a death wish, and Jackass: Best and Last is here to prove it. The fifth and explicitly final Jackass movie (not including spin-offs and bonus-footage alternate versions, all spawned from the infamous early-2000s show on MTV) is a highlights reel of lowlife inanity, sprinkled with a couple new scenes of high voltage action, talking-head interview moments with surprisingly wistful reflections and too many gag-inducing gags built around poop.

The anal fixation on display is impressive: not only does Steve-O get a prostate exam from a sassy robot (voiced by comedian Adam Ray) who uses chunky peanut butter as lube, but a quartet of guys see who can shit the fastest after chugging a super-laxative usually reserved for colonoscopy patients to clean out their colons. One scene focuses entirely on whether or not Steve-O can use his sphincter muscles to squeeze a ping pong ball out of his rectum. This is Jackass, with an emphasis on ASS.

Jackass: Best and Last ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Jeff Tremaine
Starring: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Wee Man, Dave England, Danger Ehren, Preston Lacy, Rachel Wolfson, Jasper Dolphin, Dark Shark, Poopies, Zach Holmes
Running time: 92 mins

The fifth dip back into the now-shallow Jackass well basically functions as a for-the-fans-only victory lap, with little interest to recruit a new audience and little effort put into imaginative new bits. Don’t expect the kind of goofy craftsmanship on display in Jackass Number Two, which climaxed with a hilariously amateurish (though weirdly polished) song-and-dance finale worthy of Busby Berkeley, Buster Keaton, and Looney Tunes. Or the green-painted phallus otherwise known as Pontisaurus attacking a city, the shlong schtick that opened Jackass Forever.

When they’re not re-running old clips, or shooting an elaborate new sequence that just pays homage to old clips, they’re simply giving themselves a much-deserved rest on their black-and-blue laurels. Most of the new material in Jackass: Best and Last is a litany of repeated butthole penetration, rampant defecation, and multiple shocks via taser gun darts, stun batons, and electric chairs. Painful, for sure. But eventually kind of tedious in its voluntary torture. Maybe those brutal bits are the few remaining stress tests that their fiftysomething bodies can still endure. No more cactus rolls or rattlesnake face bites, please. And definitely nothing that involves hurtling yourselves into bone-crushing impacts.

But when Jackass was good, over its quarter-century run, it was very, very good. Like Knoxville in an orange L.A. Country jumpsuit going into a West Hollywood hardware store to get a hacksaw. Or Knoxville as Bad Grandpa doling out “a serving of Irving” by going into a black male stripper joint, dropping trou and dancing on a pole with a footlong prosthetic ball sack hanging out of his tighty-whities. Or Knoxville insisting on getting hit by a bull so hard he double-somersaults into the air, getting yet another concussion and famously suffering a brain hemorrhage.

In their heyday, these jackasses pranked fellow Angelenos by brazenly abducting Brad Pitt outside of Pink’s hot dog stand. They pranked a bar full of daytime drinkers by staging a dwarf brawl featuring Wee Man that got busted up by dwarf cops and dwarf paramedics. They pranked a doctor’s office by getting the late Ryan Dunn to shove a car toy up his own ass and pretend that he had passed out at a frat house and woke up with a sore butt.

The age of Jackass might be officially over, but what it represents is a warped Eden of benign boorishness. The tv show and movies have become an odd time capsule when our culture was innocently lewd—and lewdly innocent. There’s no malicious intent on display. It’s physical abuse with a smile. It’s cruelty-free. Never have so many sadistic stunts spotlighting masochistic machismo ended in such suffocating laughter, from both perpetrator and victim alike.

The film opens with a never-before-seen 1998 clip of Knoxville performing the very first proto-Jackass act: wearing a Kevlar vest and shooting himself in the chest with a Smith & Wesson pistol. As an origin story, the moment could have easily tipped into nihilistic darkness. But the buoyancy of the camera crew — and of Knoxville’s charismatic go-for-broke bro energy — led to a groin-slapping, sack-tapping, face-punching, stooge-inflected empire of idiotic entertainment (courtesy Dickhouse Productions) all scored to the Tex-Mex glee of the Minutemen’s “Corona.”

Too bad Paramount didn’t release this movie next year, since 2027 is the first time that films will have a Stunt Design category at the Academy Awards. Critical to all the Jackass lunacy are undeniably impressive feats of always fearless — and sometimes even ingenious — physicality that only very talented professionals can perform. Did they just pass up their only chance at Oscar gold? What jackasses.