The Jackass Crew Goes Out Tired, Bruised, and Weirdly Emotional

Twenty-five years after a 27-year-old named Philip John Clapp strapped on a bulletproof vest, stacked a few magazines under it, and shot himself in the chest for a laugh, the Jackass guys are calling it. Best and Last is the fifth and final mainline film in the franchise, and it shows up as two movies stitched together. One is a reunion special with a fresh round of stunts. The other is a clip show pulling from a quarter century of MTV episodes, theatrical footage, and material that never made it past legal.

The proportions matter. Generous math puts the new footage at around 40 percent of a 92-minute runtime, and that number includes previously unseen sequences rather than freshly shot ones. If you walked in expecting a fifth Jackass movie, you are getting closer to a farewell tour with a highlight reel playing on the screen behind the band.

Knoxville spends most of the film as master of ceremonies rather than crash test dummy, which is the correct call after the concussions he collected getting flipped by a bull in Jackass Forever. He hovers at the edge of frame, taunts his friends into terrible decisions, and gets visibly emotional more than once when anyone asks whether this is really the end. That is a strange thing to watch from the guy whose entire brand was refusing to flinch, and it is the most honest material in the movie.

The new stunts are not top tier and nobody involved seems to be pretending otherwise. What they are is committed. A post-laxative game of Twister goes exactly where you fear it goes. Steve-O, eighteen-plus years sober and still the most willing participant in the building, submits to a prostate exam from a robot voiced by comedian Adam Ray. There is an escape room built entirely out of traps, a Botox injection sequence with Poopies that plays like a horror short, and an office party where Knoxville, Chris Pontius, and Jasper Dolphin try to cheer up a coworker who happens to be an extremely annoyed billy goat. Knoxville also drags Irving Zisman out of retirement for a trip to a male strip club, and there is something quietly funny about the fact that he is now much closer to Bad Grandpa’s age than to the version of himself who first put on the makeup.

The archival half is where the movie earns its title, and also where it stumbles. Seeing the crew at 25 cut against the crew at 55 does more work than any talking head interview could. The best find in the whole film is the previously unseen first take of the bull stunt from Forever, the one that ended with Knoxville concussed and going back for another pass anyway. Old bits land differently when you already know what the next fifteen years cost these bodies.

Then there are the two absences. Bam Margera turns up through unreleased footage shot for Jackass Forever before he was fired, including a genuinely great bit where he is locked in a pitch-black room with what he believes is a rattlesnake while Knoxville prowls around in night vision goggles with jumper cables. It is a jolt of the old chemistry, and it also underlines that no actual reconciliation happens on screen. Ryan Dunn gets more room, and the footage of him with Bam in the early CKY days is the part of the credits sequence that will wreck longtime fans. Some critics have argued that the film never gives Dunn a real spoken goodbye, and that criticism is fair. These guys will sit naked under each other’s bare backsides on a dare and then go completely mute the second a real feeling enters the room.

The other structural problem is the newer cast. Rachel Wolfson barely registers. Dark Shark and Jasper mostly stand off to the side laughing at other people’s misery. Poopies is the only recent addition who feels fully integrated, which makes sense given how much of the film is built around a bond that predates all of them. Bringing in fresh blood worked in Forever because there was room to introduce them. Here they are competing for screen time with 25 years of footage they were not in.

Numbers-wise, the movie holds the best reviews of the franchise and the worst box office. It pulled 18.2 million domestic and 27.3 million worldwide against a 10 million dollar production budget, the lowest earner in the series, and left North American theaters on July 30. It hit premium video on demand August 11 across Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and YouTube.

As a comedy, it is uneven and openly padded. As a goodbye it works, mostly because the thing Jackass was always selling was never the stunts. It was a group of friends who genuinely loved each other finding increasingly stupid excuses to stay in the same room. That room is closing now, and the movie knows it. Watch it with your own dumb friends, which is the only way any of these have ever played correctly.