Jackass: Best and Last Is Not the Best Jackass, and It Might Not Be the Last

This is the one with the robot rectal exam, which appears to be exactly as painful as it sounds, though I’m sure the fact that they use crunchy peanut butter as a lubricant adds some extra ouch to the whole endeavor. It’s also the one where they give Sean Patrick “Poopies” McInerney lip injections. The one where they have an office party and dress up in ties, only to get knocked around by an angry ram. Where they play naked Twister after downing some colonoscopy-grade laxatives. Rectal exams. Lip injections. Office parties. Colonoscopies. Jackass: Best and Last makes a mockery of growing old, entering the real world, trying to hold back the wrinkles and the aches and the creeping sense of mortality. It is both a revolt against and a surrender to the ravages of time.

The film itself embodies these ravages because it’s barely a movie — much of it (perhaps most of it) consists of bits from previous entries, either in montages or extended revisits. The best in the title isn’t meant to suggest that this is the best Jackass yet but rather that it’s partly a “best of” compilation. And the last? Head Jackass Johnny Knoxville’s devilish insincerity, which he’s used so well in the past, feels off-key here: When he gets teary-eyed onscreen about the end of Jackass, we want to believe him because we want to believe that what we’re seeing is genuine. But we also sort of hope he’s lying because that means he’ll make more of these films. Jackass: Best and Last might feel like a glorified DVD extra, but it’s not un-fun. There are probably worse things you could do than sit in a theater yukking it up with others to old Jackass clips.

The retread vibe does nag a bit, though. Jackass Forever, a much better movie, did a lot of this stuff, too, serving as a reverie while also delivering mostly new material. (One of the best and most elaborate gags from that previous entry, “The Silence of the Lambs,” is revisited here, now with added footage that includes original crewmember Bam Margera, who had been kicked off the team during that movie’s production.) Age and vulnerability were the running themes of that earlier film as well. Knoxville’s shock of white hair, a result of him stopping coloring it during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, kept reminding us that these were humans. If once upon a time we marveled at the amount of abuse these bodies could take, now we cringed at it with sympathetic recognition. Jackass’s audience had, after all, aged right along with its perpetrators.

But maybe that earlier movie also holds the key to this one. When Jackass Forever came out in 2022, the world was still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, which surely affected its box office. But it also gave the film a certain communitarian glow, which drew our attention in a way it might not have before those days of global solitude. That picture reminded us that the key to Jackass isn’t so much the stunts themselves but the response they get. A Jackass stunt isn’t really a Jackass stunt if it doesn’t end with that peculiar mix of agony and joy: the victim yowling (and sometimes puking and crying and attacking) but also laughing, always laughing, while their friends in the peanut gallery join in on the laughter, the whole thing ending in a handheld blur of camaraderie and belonging. So what if the stunts aren’t all new? So what if none of the new stuff can match the glories of “Poo Cocktail Supreme”? So what if some of the new crewmembers introduced in the previous movie don’t have much to do this time around? Jackass: Best and Last recaptures the communion, and maybe that’s all that matters.