Pour one out for the “Jackass” crew. They’re done. “Jackass: Best and Last” is a sad but fitting end to an extreme stunt franchise that was vanquished not by imagination but time.
The fifth and final main installment has all that you’d expect from the Jackass Cinematic Universe — genitalia, electricity, gravity and port-a-potties, often combined. Only this time, the clips from past stunts swamp the new.
It begins with a 1998 scene once too shocking to air — head nutcase Johnny Knoxville shooting himself in the chest with a 38-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun, protected only by a Kevlar vest and some girlie magazines for padding. (“Don’t be stupid,” he is told, advice he chooses to ignore for a quarter of a century). The movie ends about an hour and a half later with his merry band of idiots worried about their prostates.
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Knoxville, badly injured after being rammed by a bull in 2022’s “Jackass Forever” film, is in the new movie recast as a sort of deranged master of ceremonies, wearing a bow tie as he creates bedlam for others but doesn’t partake. He’s like a maniacal Peter Pan sitting out a fight in Neverland.
“I’m sad,” he acknowledges, calling it “a natural place to stop.”
In the void, the insane mainstay regulars — including Stephen “Steve-O” Glover, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, Chris Pontius and Ehren “Danger” McGhehey — undergo what would send most humans into lifetime therapy, like a prostate exam conducted by a 4-foot humanoid robot using peanut butter as a lubricant — chunky style!
There are reruns of really funny clips, like the time they used air horns to ruffle the feathers of elderly golfers in 2002, or when Knoxville, dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit and handcuffs, went into a hardware store looking for a hacksaw, creating a real police emergency in 2000.
We also go back to 2022 for a re-airing of the bit when the “Jackass” crew are locked in a room without light and led to believe a diamondback rattlesnake is loose. We are reminded that early stunts were rudimentary, like the until-now-unaired clip of Knoxville climbing into a flimsy cardboard box with some pillows and rolled down a huge flight of cement stairs.
Who can forget Steve-O thrown into the air in a very full port-a-potty and bouncing on bungee cords until he is completely drenched from 2010? Relive that in slo-mo. Or when the late Ryan Dunn put a toy car up his rectum and then consulted stunned X-ray technicians? Or when Brad Pitt staged his own kidnapping outside a fast-food joint?
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New stunts are less involved, like Sean “Poopies” McInerney having so much hyaluronic acid injected into his lips that he resembles a cracked Real Housewife. There’s also a funny sequence in which a feisty ram in a small room repeatedly butts Davon “Jasper” Wilson. There is a palpable brotherhood here among the group, forged by terror and humiliation.
Regretfully, comedian Rachel Wolfson, the first woman to join the crew, is demoted to cheerleader in the final movie; one step forward in 2022 is one step back in 2026. And Pontius attempting a high-jump while naked — recreating the original Olympics — is, well, flaccid.
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If you think that perhaps the demise of “Jackass” has something to do with “wokeness” or the end of the era of guys-being-guys, may we remind you that folks were just doing dirt bike jumps on the South Lawn and there was a UFC cage-fighting show at the White House.
One of the movie’s last stunts shows the gang’s age. In a nod to them mostly being in their 50s and now encountering colonoscopies, the human crash test dummies drink powerful laxatives, don plastic pants and then play Twister until they defecate. Then they vomit. (Classy, guys.)
In a sad sort of coda, we return to the “Jackass Forever” sequence that signaled the end: Knoxville versus the bull. We learn that before he suffered serious brain injuries following a second face-off, there was a first that was deemed not violent enough. So we see the first and then the second. And then see him hauled away in an ambulance.
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Perhaps the “Jackass” franchise — born before social media — has a hard time competing with the flood of insanity online or with the threat of fakeness via artificial intelligence. But age takes its toll. We await the next generation willing to take a wooden mallet to the groin.
“Jackass: Best and Last,” a Paramount Pictures release that hits theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “extremely dangerous stunts and crude material throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language and sexual material.” Running time: 92 minutes. One star out of four.
