Jackass: Best and Last review – kings of gross-out comedy’s final, funny farewell

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The boy-men of Jackass, a three-season MTV comedy-stunt show turned periodic and beloved film series, have shown a willingness to engage in all manner of rectal probing in the name of shock laughs. (Perhaps most famously, Ryan Dunn, who died in 2011, inserted a toy car into himself before going in for an X-ray.) So it’s poignant to see the ageing crew take this to a natural next step in Jackass: Best and Last, where raspy-voiced fixture Steve-O submits to a prostate exam – performed by a wisecracking robot, of course. Later, the gang ingests the drug used to flush out digestive systems before a colonoscopy, and then attempts to play Twister with a grim, scatological timebomb looming. Cameraman Lance Bangs, as always, attempts to contain his retching.

It would be a stretch to describe this fifth and allegedly final Jackass film as reflective about the ageing process, at least any more than its predecessors. Even its sense of finality has been hinted at before: way back in 2010’s Jackass 3-D, Weezer’s nostalgic song Memories blasted over end-credits footage of the guys throughout the years, and 2022’s Jackass Forever had a similarly valedictory tone. In Best and Last, someone goes so far as to tease ringleader Johnny Knoxville about whether the audience can believe him about this being the last movie, given that he’s said that sort of thing before.

Knoxville obviously doesn’t intend to be disingenuous. He’s actually touchingly sincere; at multiple times in the movie, his voice breaks as he talks about wrapping up the series. But what ultimately may be most convincing about this movie’s finale status is the fact that Jackass: Best and Last doesn’t contain a full feature’s worth of new stunts and pranks, not quite. Though no one exactly says so, it seems like the crew, giddy as they appear throughout, understands that accruing a full 90 minutes’ worth of footage (which would involve shooting even more) might be genuinely life-endangering at their ages. So the resulting project is closer to a true compilation film than any of the previous entries, somewhere between those Looney Tunes movies where new animated segments wrapped around excerpts from the classic shorts, and a greatest hits album that comes packaged with a second disc of new songs and rarities.

Don’t misunderstand: there are plenty of new stunts performed by the old gang. They’re not swapping in for younger replacements either, given that among the new recruits from the previous film, only the guy nicknamed “Poopies” actually does much on camera, like getting a truly ridiculous amount of lip filler injected as a joke. (Rachel Wolfson and Jasper Dolphin, both charming in Jackass Forever, seem to be here primarily as moral support; they hardly perform any actual stunts, at least nothing that made the final cut.) For that matter, some of the footage that isn’t recent is nonetheless new to most audiences. The film reaches back to the early days of the show for segments MTV wouldn’t allow them to air, including a funny bit where Knoxville dresses up in a prison jumpsuit and handcuffs, then visits a hardware store to shop for a hacksaw. The movie also opens with some impressively sweat-inducing footage of a pre-MTV Knoxville, kind of a brief Jackass: Origins involving a bulletproof vest; it’s tense even with the knowledge that obviously its subject survives for at least another quarter-century.

Hardcore fans of the series and movies may be disappointed by a movie that’s at least one-third previously seen footage; there’s also the danger of overshadowing the newer bits by placing them alongside classics. One new sequence, designed as an escape room from hell, does feel like it peters out prematurely before it can truly fulfill its destiny as a slapstick variation on Saw. But seeing a Jackass movie with a crowd is still a kick, and Knoxville’s still got it. And by “it”, I mean the willingness to get into the ring with a furious bull, and then go back when he doesn’t quite get the shot he wants.

A fifth Jackass, even one that’s part-grand-finale clip show, is especially valuable in the wake of something like the sixth Scary Movie, which made such a big fuss over its willingness to go too far (meaning, mostly, make dumb jokes about gay or trans people). The Jackass crew genuinely puts themselves in physical danger for their comedy, and yet even at their grossest, the movies are suffused with a communal sense of joy and acceptance, rather than self-satisfaction over their envelope-pushing. Before they go, Team Jackass makes it clear that they’re the true kings of horror comedy.