Jackass: Best And Last review, in short, is a look at the fifth outing from this fearless and occasionally feckless gang of pranksters and would-be stuntmen who have been daring each other into wincingly painful tricks since the turn of the millennium. The lone woman on the roster this time, Rachel Wolfson, doesn't perform any pranks in the film.
Series co-creator Johnny Knoxville and the rest of his increasingly ageing team know they can't really keep thrashing their bodies and testing their physical resilience in such unpleasant ways, as much fun as they're all clearly still having. Watching them get slammed in the nuts, injected and Tasered remains riotously funny, but it also feels a bit like watching Tom Cruise repeatedly defy death in the later Mission: Impossible films: hugely impressive, yet enough to make you beg them to stop, for the love of God, before all this insanity kills them.
Fewer fresh stunts, more old memories
Anyone hoping for brand-new madness here may walk away disappointed. Of the film's 92 minutes, less than an hour is devoted to entirely new stunts. A typical fresh entry has Steve-O, the most prominent Jackass survivor after Knoxville, taking a forceful prostate exam from a robot, its metal fingers lubed up with peanut butter. It's a disgusting, deeply uncomfortable scene that will have all but the most stoic viewer laughing to the verge of tears.
Among the resurfaced old clips, many will gasp at Ryan Dunn inserting a toy car into his anus, while others will cheer as Knoxville rides a rocket into the air and crashes into a lake.
The scene that never aired on TV
One previously unseen clip, which MTV refused to broadcast on the TV series, shows Knoxville convincingly dressed as an escaped convict, hacksawing his way through handcuffs in a hardware store before getting arrested. It's a typically audacious and utterly idiotic stunt that escalates dramatically when the LAPD turn up with guns drawn.
But then, thinking things through has never really been the point of Jackass, and that is part of its appeal too. If this truly is goodbye, it feels dumbly fitting.
