Starting way back in 2000 no one thought that Jackass TV series would take off the way it did even less so when it came to big screen feature films. And yet here we are with the fifth and purportedly final film with Jackass Best and Last. Still with Johnny Knoxville as the figure head for a team that has lost members over the years but the core team return along with a couple of others and the film rewinds back to when it all began with the Knoxville’s very first stunt. It saw him wearing a bullet proof vest then shooting himself whilst his friends filmed it. It’s little surprise that MTV never aired the stunt but here it sets out the irreverence and wholesale disregard for their own safety that has seen the team sustain various injuries over the years.
This new film is a mix of previously unbroadcastable stunts, favourites moments from the old films and some new stuff and the majority of it is funny and some of it, one prank in particular, will audiences averting their eyes from the poo and puke that features in many of the pranks. As always the crux of many of the stunts is the team wilfully inflicting pain on themselves but tellingly the best pranks and stunts avoid this notably in one scene where the team will sit in a room with a rattlesnake, that is until they come to film it and Knoxville locks them in, turns off the lights and the snake escapes….except the snake was never there having been removed previously unknown to the detainees. Their reactions to what they perceive is happening is priceless. But at the other end of the scale is the gross out stuff notably a game of twister played by the team who have drunk heavy duty fast acting laxative and it'[s as gruesome as it sounds. It’s that scene alone that likely earned the film its 18 certificate.
For fans of the series there’s reminders of old team members Bam Margera , sacked by Knoxville for suspected issues with substance abuse and far more tragically Ryan Dunn who was killed in a terrible drink drive accident. The teams new members include the morbidly obese Zach Holmes whose backside features prominently in many of the pranks. Also joining the team is Rachel Wolfson who does nothing whatsoever but stand and watch – perhaps her scenes never made the cut but she seems to serve no purpose other than to break up the otherwise all male team.
With the all the members now significantly older and likely taking far longer to recover from injury and with Knoxville being 55 years of age the interval between films means he and the others will likely be in the their 60’s if they ever did a another so it’s understandable why this is likely to be the last film. For the first time the film is not all new content and the use of old clips and unseen material would suggest that its now getting harder to come up with new ideas. At its absolute peak Jackass was a lot of fun and there’s still flashes of it here so whilst this might be the last film but it’s not necessarily the best. Either way they will be missed.
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Here’s the trailer…..
