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Who ever imagined, back when we were all younger and less weary, that we’d be getting a new “Jackass” film in the year 2026? When the first big-screen spinoff of this quintessentially turn-of-the-millennium franchise
hit screens in 2002, you wouldn’t have counted on Johnny Knoxville even living past 30 — much less still submitting, decades later, to raging bulls and grievous genital peril in the name of comedy. To be fair, he and the whole Jackass gang probably wouldn’t have done, either. Which is partly what gives “Jackass: Best and Last,” the extreme slapstick troupe’s sixth and officially final film, its charm: Every one of the group’s stupid, juvenile stunts is underpinned by an enduring, exhilarated disbelief that they still get to do this for a living, and that we still want to watch.
And we do, even if “Jackass: Best and Last” — essentially a greatest-hits compilation interspersed with new and previously unaired footage — suggests that retirement wouldn’t be the worst idea. Concussions literally hit different in your fifties, after all: The appeal of “Jackass” has always combined giddy hilarity with some degree of aghast concern for the performers’ well-being, but you don’t want the latter overtaking the former. Still, there’s poignancy here in seeing the guys’ middle-aged bodies marked by the wear and tear of their peculiar chosen profession, alongside various fading joke tattoos that seemed funnier a quarter-century ago, as they take yet another voluntary beating. Admittedly, “poignancy” is not a word you’d have ever applied to this franchise in its earlier days. Either they’ve grown, or we have.
With all that said, it would be a mistake to get either too sentimental or too intellectual about a film in which the new material includes a grown man called Poopies attempting to cross a balance beam with an electric shock collar fastened around his penis. It’s business as usual here: gags resting on physical pain, humiliation and sexless nudity, in which the general air of good-natured camaraderie between the players largely fends off any potential cruelty or gay panic. The new ones are mostly solid enough to stand beside the old ones, and if you’re not a franchise fanatic, you might have a hard time determining a timeline here if not for the craggy impositions of age, and Knoxville’s whitening hair. (Between the silver barnet and now ever-present shades, he’s steadily aging into Jim Jarmusch. It suits him.)
The highlights are mostly old, though: “Jackass” by its very nature is hit-and-miss, so it’s flattered by a best-of format, curated by collective memory. A candid camera-style prank from 2002, in which Knoxville camouflages himself on a golf course and aggravates players with rudely timed airhorn blasts, was a high point of the first film and remains a high point of this one — a riotous reminder that the team’s comedy isn’t always dependent on extreme physical suffering. Indeed, many of the biggest laughs here still come from the simplest setups: man steps on rake, for example, or man gets football in the groin. The argument that the “Jackass” crew is the 21st-century answer to Buster Keaton is strongest where the jokes are divorced from the general spirit of shock-chasing that characterized much early-2000s reality TV, and now seems quite quaint.
Which isn’t to write off the higher-concept grossout shtick — something of a big-screen novelty in 2026, when equivalent material is largely the preserve of witless TikTok content, executed with far less flair and good cheer. With that context, old stunts like the Poo Cocktail Supreme from 2010’s “Jackass 3D,” in which Steve-O gets drenched in a flying port-a-potty, still impress with their sheer elaborate bravado, while a new, impressively horrible sequence involving laxatives and Twister is in much the same spirit. You can see that one making future highlight reels; less so an overlong bit in which game guest star Paul Walter Hauser is strapped down and threatened with giving one of the crew a rim job. (Never growing up is essential to the “Jackass” brand, of course, but the continued reliance on butt stuff as a punchline is perhaps the component of their shtick that has aged least well.)
Occasionally a wistful note enters Knoxville’s commentary as he reflects on how this film will (supposedly, at least) be the team’s last ride — an awareness that, at 55, he might have finally reached capacity, whatever the title of 2022’s “Jackass Forever” promised. But not for long, when there are still pratfalls to stage and pants to drop and robot prostate exams to supervise. “I’m not in touch with my emotions,” quips his right-hand man Chris Pontius when asked if he feels any sadness at saying goodbye, but what binds and lifts all this foolery is the palpable love they have for what they do, and the other people doing it. You leave “Jackass: Best and Last” believing that they’ll actually miss all this, and that’s enough to make us miss it too.
