Empires have risen and fallen via a single bullet. (Just ask Archduke Franz Ferdinand.) In this case, the shot was fired from a .38 caliber pistol in the California desert, on a warm day in January 1998. The finger on the trigger belonged to Philip John
Clapp, better known by his stage name: Johnny Knoxville. He was also the victim. P.J., as his friends called him, was going to test out a bulletproof vest. He strapped on some Kevlar, stuffed some copies of Hustler under his shirt for extra “protection,” pointed the gun at his chest, and cycled through the revolver’s empty rounds, Russian-roulette style, until he engaged the live round. His friends captured the whole thing on their video camera. It was made for the skating magazine Big Brother, but the tape eventually helped Knoxville score a TV deal. The rest is history. The Jackass age had officially begun.
This infamous clip kicks off Jackass: Best and Last, the final go-round for Knoxville and his bruised, battered, and put-a-toy-car-up-your-butt friends — after the requisite disclaimer that you should not try these dumbass stunts at home, of course. It’s not the most shocking thing in the movie, though. That would be the edit that comes right after the sequence, which cuts from the baby-faced, 26-year-old kid in the videocam footage to a 54-year-old Knoxville, staring straight into the camera. He was already slouching toward middle age in 2022’s Jackass Forever. But going from the giggling kid who just took a self-inflicted bullet to the guy with fully gray hair and the lines on his face only underlines the decades of hard living and bull-related injuries that separates those two Knoxvilles. Dude has stared down angry steers, strapped himself to homemade rockets, shot himself out of a cannon, and recreated variations of this award-winning movie more times than you can count. There’s just one thing that our man in the red Converse All-Stars can’t out-prank: time.
So let us bid a fond farewell to Knoxville, and Steve-O, and Wee Man, and Sean “Poopies” McInerney, and Chris Pontius, and Chris Pontius’s penis. Parting is such sweet sorrow, but these guys aren’t going gently into the night just yet. They’re throwing themselves a proper retirement party, complete with booby-trapped escape rooms, naked Olympian competitions, and genital shock collars. Everyone in the Jackass gang is feeling their age now, which is why, instead of vignettes featuring boxing matches in department stores and pulling teeth via speeding sports cars, their new bits involve prostate exams and that stuff you drink before getting a colonoscopy. It’s just so much harder to bounce back from, say, a hangover or falling on a bed of hot coals in your fifties than it was in your twenties.
Jackass: Best and Last is a victory lap for nearly 30 years of doing ridiculous, stupid, death-defying shit in the name of entertainment, a greatest-hits and outtakes compilation that’s buffered by a half dozen or so fresh hells that Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine put their sometimes-willing participants through. The format actually works better than you might think, given that the films have always just been feature-length collections of the stunts and double-dog dares that the crew concocted. The old blends and bleeds, literally, into the new, a through-line of gonzo fearlessness connects on era to the next, and that Poo Cocktail gag (emphasis on “gag”) is funny no matter how many times you see it. The move from TV to the big screen turned out to be key, however, because seeing all these self-harm sketches with an audience was a major upgrade. Laughing at Knoxville get bit in the nipple by a baby alligator with your friends in your living room was a gas. Laughing at that same clip with a hundred other people in a theater? A whole other, far superior experience.
That’s what we’ll miss the most about seeing these movies, and Knoxville knows it. So here’s another communal chance to crack up at Steve O in being launched into orbit inside a Port-a-Potty! You’re welcome. As for the new bits? The hair may be grayer, the paunches a little more pronounced, and the joints a little creakier, but the Jackass promise of delivering the missing link between the Three Stooges and a snuff film remains. Witnessing Poopies don a shock collar on his dong and try to walk across a balance beam while being zapped — imagine the “Ow! My Balls!” sequence in Idiocracy repeated several times over — still works even if you know the poor guy needs to start seriously thinking about his 401(k). In the spirit of nothing less to lose, the gang also throws in some never-aired sequences, notably one involving Knoxville pretending to be an escaped convict in a hardware store. That prank allegedly got MTV banned from filming in West Hollywood for 10 years.
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger,” Mel Brooks once noted. “Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” It’s not like tragedy isn’t part of the Jackass legacy; older sequences featuring the late Ryan Dunn carry a bit of a sting, and the recurring presence of Bam Margera in so much of the archival footage only highlights the fact that he’s AWOL in the new stuff. But the entire operation has been predicated on the fact that these lovable knuckleheads are falling into an open sewer in the name of comedy for us. They go out with a bang here, and while the jury is out on the “best” tag, we can say that this is likely the “last” of it. Cinema began with a train pulling into a station. It now ends with a pair of drooping prosthetic testicles slapping against a stripper pole. Thank you for your service, Knoxville & co. Your watch has ended.
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