And now, the end is near…: The team from ‘Jackass: Best and Last’.
JACKASS: BEST AND LAST * (92 minutes) MA
Though it’s funny in bits, the latest and last Jackass movie (or so we’re promised) is simply too repulsive to recommend to anyone other than hardcore fans. Very hardcore. With strong stomachs. And super-human gag reflex control.
A greying Johnny Knoxville hosts his aging gang of knuckleheads as they reflect on some of their favourite stunts over the decades. They also perform some new gags with the aid of a robot and a woman whose presence is never quite explained.
There are some good laughs early on – the air horn on the golf course is still funny – yet the fun element of their pranks soon gives way to a collective preoccupation with each others’ genitals, posteriors and fecal matter.
One especially revolting sequence involves a game of naked Twister after select Jackass team members imbibe a super-strong laxative designed to clean out the rectum before a medical procedure.
The spectacle is even more gross than it sounds, prompting team members to vomit on camera – a common sight throughout the film, usually in stunts featuring excrement.
Being tasteless can be funny, as the Borat films demonstrated, yet what transpires here are repeated examples of being disgusting for its own sake – which gets kinda boring, kinda quickly.
On the plus side: stunts that went too far are featured and there are some trace elements of the brutal prankster wit that triggered the best of their gags.
Among the favourites: the giant hand slap; the little people bar fight; the bull toss; all the snake stuff. Of scientific note is the bit involving electronic muscle control.
Oddly, we are shown the gents expressing real fear and pain, often as they are loaded into an ambulance giving a defiant thumbs up. This highlights one of the enduring mysteries of Jackass – why show this?
They humiliate and torture each other for the sake of useable footage. Do they really warrant sympathy when things go awry?
Which brings us to the film’s most glaring omission, being the motorcycle stunt where Johnny Knoxville famously broke his penis. A fleeting snippet appears in the closing credits but without context.
Such a key event in the history of Jackass – Knoxville slowly recovered, allowing him to have more children – surely deserved emphasis and maybe a few pointed questions about the wisdom of extreme risk taking.
The fact that it gets none highlights the missed opportunity to inject some genuine documentary elements into the film. Unlike some of our trashier “reality TV” programs, it doesn’t even make the pretense of being a social experiment or have any redeeming value outside of making viewers laugh and squirm.
It brings to mind the legacy of Candid Camera creator Allen Funt, who was immensely proud of how the set ups created for the show were used in universities to study human behaviour.
Speaking of which, it doesn’t say much for Charles Darwin and his Theory of Evolution that the movie is bookended by a warning to certain members of the human species that the stunts featured in the film are not to be imitated.
Such warnings actually work against Darwin as they caution those who would otherwise be happy to ride a jetski through a hedge or shoot themselves with a revolver.
Surely letting these people emulate the dangerous and often stupid stunts that have become the Jackass signature would only advance humanity by…what is the phrase?…oh, yes…removing their contribution to the gene pool.
Knoxville has made some good movies, such as The Dukes of Hazard and The Ringer. Perhaps he can get back to doing that now that he has survived three decades of Jackass intact.
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