Since its earliest days, “Jackass” has always demanded a degree of intestinal fortitude — both from its audience and its cast members. Of all of the things to be tugged at in “Jackass: Best and Last,” the one that fans may least expect is their heartstrings.
Longtime ringleader Johnny Knoxville tears up not once but twice over the course of the series’ purported swan song, including when asked if this fifth film is truly the last. Knoxville insists that it is, and given the grey hair and scars he and his colleagues have collected over the last two and a half decades, you can see that they’ve earned it.
Yet leave it to these mischief makers to deliver a final chapter that serves as a requiem, a victory lap and an envelope-pusher all at once. By any measure, “Jackass: Best and Last” delivers the most joyful and beautifully bittersweet entertainment of the summer, reminding longtime fans and lucky newcomers of the sublime pleasures of horseplay — especially when orchestrated by experts, daredevils, or just the very, very stupid.
Switching up the format slightly this time around, Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine alternate between new material, classic gags and unseen material too dangerous (physically or legally) to be previously broadcast.
In the unseen category, one of the very first stunts that Knoxville ever filmed was one in which he shoots himself point-blank with a pistol, and later, dressed as an escaped inmate bargaining for a hacksaw in a West Hollywood hardware store. Among the new stunts are one where a younger “Jackass” acolyte, Sean “Poopies” McInerney, gets his lips injected — graphically — with botox, and an “office party” where Knoxville, Chris Pontius and Jasper Dolphin attempt to cheer up their coworker, a predictably grumpy billy goat.
The connective tissue between this material is footage from earlier films, as when Knoxville and Ehren McGhehey snuck onto a golf course and fired an airhorn in the midst of golfers’ backswings. The archival footage vividly underscores the passage of time for the core “Jackass” crew, which includes Pontius, Steve-O, Jason “Wee Man” Acuna, Preston Lacy and Dave England, and everything they’ve subjected themselves to. It also highlights a few key absences, including Bam Margera, who was fired from “Jackass Forever” for drug and alcohol abuse, and the late Ryan Dunn, Margera’s friend and bandmate.
Without them there, viewers are alerted to the unique personalities, and chemistry, that made “Jackass” so successful. Margera possessed a slightly mopey heartthrob quality that made him especially vulnerable to Knoxville and Tremaine’s torment, subjecting him over the years to repeated bit where he was either going to get bitten by snakes, or believed that he was. Dunn was Margera’s best friend, and seemingly because of that he was the cast member he most picked on, but what made Dunn’s participation so alluring was an innate sweetness that stood in juxtaposition to the mischievousness-bordering-on-meanness of some of the other members of the group. You can tell that both are missed here.
But the most enduring quality of “Jackass” has been its unfettered joy — as entertainment, as a group of friends, as a platform for immaturity and silliness. What these guys (and one woman) do to one another is either funny to you, or it isn’t — and “Best and Last” won’t likely convert longtime critics, wherever those unhappy individuals may exist. Every single skit ends with a raucous round of laughter from everybody involved, sometimes the loudest from its “victim.”
More remarkably, you seldom if ever get the sense that “victim” is even the right term for the recipient of whatever painful, awkward, excrement-covered, vomit-inducing activity that the team has dreamed up. Their decision to go through with, say, a prostate exam given by an autonomous robot may be inexplicable to the layperson, but even after expressing some trepidation, they’re always willing. (Even McGhehey, who’s the guy they all seem to pick on the most, and after several decades you kinda feel like he deserves it.)
Director Jeff Tremaine has grown substantially since the days of recording stunts with camcorders, and lends a polished, cinematic quality to the scenes that bookend the film: opening credits that recreate the gliding floors of Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity’ music video and add face punches and cactus impalement, and a finale that calls back to their “giant shopping cart” bit from “Jackass: The Movie” amplifying the explosions. The irony is that these segments don’t especially need to be well-done, and often the behind-the-scenes footage, which they almost always show, is funnier than the finished version. But there’s a lot of charm in the trying, and Tremaine oversees it with a careful, if winking eye.
Finally, as at the very beginning, there’s Knoxville, shown here so early in “Jackass”’ incubation that he’s actually referred to a few times by his real name, P.J. Clapp. The irony of his achievement is that it seems too lowbrow to admire; when so much of one’s work involves men being hammered in the groin, it’s easy to suggest that he has built an empire pandering to the lowest common denominator. But if you listen to his quick-witted improvisations while dressed as “Bad Grandpa” or look at the visual or audio references dropped in their gags over the years, there’s a literacy that deeply relates everything they do to a certain kind of pop culture junkie. And more than that, his work includes everyone, or at least invites them all to enjoy it.
That’s why this may be the first time “Jackass” induces tears that aren’t either from laughter or disgust. Watching Knoxville get emotional, you feel the length of the journey he’s taken, you’re grateful he went through it on your behalf, and are as sad to see it come to an end as it may be physically necessary for a 55-year-old who’s been spun like a top — twice — by an angry bull.
Notwithstanding its “greatest hits” segments, “Jackass: Best and Last” is a worthy and satisfying resting point, but it falls slightly short of being the franchise’s superlative installment (that would be “Jackass Number Two”). But it also didn’t need to — and anyway, by what measurement? Testicles crushed? Heads concussed? Pairs of pants shat?
Regardless, Knoxville, Tremaine and their accomplices amply demonstrate with this latest batch of brutality how tough aging can be when your job is risking your life. What elevates this film after four others, 26 years and enough injuries to occupy a fleet of ambulances, is the way they’re able to put an unexpectedly poignant spotlight on the key to their — and the series’ — enduring appeal: by never getting any wiser.
“Jackass: Best and Last” opens exclusively in theaters on June 26.