The legacy of “Jackass” has gone from a bunch of people who were practically still teenagers doing dumb stunts to an influential empire with fingerprints all over YouTube and TikTok. One of the most fascinating trivia points about “Jackass” is that the original show aired for only 10 months, from 2000 to 2001, when MTV ran three short seasons that it then replayed to death. Who could have possibly guessed that a movie featuring many of the same idiots would be hitting theaters a quarter-century later? Reportedly, the last “Jackass” movie, a fact that makes star Johnny Knoxville emotional more than once, “Jackass: Best and Last” is a bit of a Greatest Hits tour for a legendary band, a comedy that includes a few new bits, a few classics, and a few stunts that were never broadcast or included in previous films. The fact that viewers have already paid to see much of this is one of the few drawbacks, but real fans likely won’t care.
The mash-up approach actually allows a bit of wistful nostalgia to bake itself into the chaos. Were Knoxville, Steve-O, Danger Ehren, Preston Lacy, and Chris Pontius ever really that young? And, of course, footage of Ryan Dunn (who passed in 2011) and Bam Margera (who’s estranged from the group) complicates the goodbyes even further. In a sense, “Best and Last” plays like a 25th high school reunion as new memories intertwine with old ones. With more feces and ball torture than your average alumni event. I hope.
The new bits in “Best and Last” cleverly comment on the age of these reckless morons, too. Whether it’s Steve-O getting a prostate exam from a robot or four of ‘em drinking the concoctions that clean out your system before a colonoscopy and then playing Twister, the gross-outs come with the recognition that middle age has its own kind of inherent pains. In 2022’s “Jackass Forever,” Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine brought on some younger faces like the insane Poopies and enormous Zach Holmes to do some of the bits that being in their forties disallowed, but the regulars are still absolute maniacs, whether it’s Knoxville getting run over by a bull again or Steve-O going for the MVP of this movie in ways that I’m not sure I can even put in a review. Let’s just say he goes out of this series screaming.
The selection of the “greatest hits” can be somewhat predictable, including some brief hits—some of my favorite “Jackass” hits of all time are mere seconds long—alongside some of the longer classics. So you’ll get to revisit “Butt X-Ray” from the original movie (a personal fave), “Silence of the Lambs” from “Jackass Forever,” and “Poo Cocktail Supreme” from “Jackass 3,” a bit so awful that it actually made people nauseous when it played theaters in 3D. At first, the inclusion of so much recycled material feels a bit cheap, and one wishes Tremaine had included more behind-the-scenes conversations about these memories to place them in a different context. But if any group has the battle scars to prove that they’ve earned a bit of a victory lap, it’s this gang.
The “Jackass” movies have developed an interplay in reviews, with critics attempting to define their place in comedy history with each film, settling somewhere between Buster Keaton and the WWE. While “Forever” hinted at a timelessness for the “Jackass” team, “Best and Last” feels more finite, a recognition that all good things must end, and a reminder that sometimes it takes a fearless kind of genius to be this dumb.
One of the most interesting things about “Jackass” has been watching its critical reputation pivot as the establishment that couldn’t find any value in reckless dudes pushing each other around parking lots in shopping carts has given way to critics who were raised on these very same lunatics. (The first film maintains the lowest score on Rotten Tomatoes; the one before this has the highest.) “Best and Last” argues that, other than some gray hair and some broken bones, these people haven’t changed as much as the world has come to recognize their special form of insane genius.
In one of the older clips in “Jackass: Best and Last,” a young Steve-O is trying to get through one of those introductions that starts with the player saying their name, but he knows as soon as he does that, he will take a baseball to the nuts. He laughs as he says, “Why do I have to be Steve-O?” Nobody else could be.
