Jackass: Best and Last Is the End, and the Reviews Say It Earns It

The first reviews for Jackass: Best and Last landed Thursday, a day before the movie opens, and the number that jumped out was the one nobody expected from a film about men setting themselves on fire for a paycheck. It is sitting around 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes off the opening wave of reviews, and the word critics keep reaching for is not "gross." It is "emotional."

That is a strange thing to write about the fifth and supposedly final chapter of a franchise that started on MTV in 2000 as a showcase for shopping-cart crashes and staple guns. But twenty-six years in, the gang is older, the stunts are a little more careful, and the people who saw it early walked out talking about mortality. Paramount opens it wide on June 26.

The basics

Tremaine has directed every Jackass feature, going back to Jackass: The Movie in 2002, through Number Two, 3D, and 2022's Jackass Forever. This one is built as part greatest-hits reel, part new material. Critics agree on the split. They disagree on whether the balance is right.

What everyone agrees on

It is funny, and it is not the best Jackass. Those two things show up in nearly every review.

On the funny side, ScreenCrush's Matt Singer wrote that "it only took 13 minutes for Jackass: Best and Last to make me laugh so hard I cried." On the ceiling, TheWrap's Todd Gilchrist called it "a worthy and satisfying resting point, but it falls slightly short of being the franchise's superlative installment (that would be Jackass Number Two)." The Daily Beast's Nick Schager landed in the same place: "Not the series' high point but nonetheless a deliriously puerile swan song for Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of mischief-makers."

So the floor is high and the ceiling is a movie from 2006. That is a fair trade for a victory lap.

The new stuff versus the old stuff

The honest worry going in was that this would be a clip show with a ticket price. It is partly that. The reviews split on how much that matters.

The optimists say the new material carries its weight. Variety's Guy Lodge: "The new ones are mostly solid enough to stand beside the old ones." Screen International's Tim Grierson found "myriad new sequences that are a little less physically demanding on the cast but still incredibly agonising or humiliating." Consequence's Liz Shannon Miller said that for "those worried about the movie playing too much like a retrospective, the new material is plentiful."

The skeptics say there is not enough of it. Singer, even while crying with laughter, flagged that "there's not enough original content." IndieWire's David Ehrlich missed the big-swing spectacle, writing that the opening sequence "is so limp compared to the Godzilla intro from Jackass Forever that it hurt me just to watch, and not in the way I wanted it to."

Mild spoilers for a couple of bits in this paragraph. The new gags the critics keep mentioning include the crew chugging colonoscopy prep fluid before a game of Twister (per AV Club's Matt Schimkowitz) and a long set piece where guest Paul Walter Hauser gets strapped down for a stunt too crude to summarize cleanly (per Lodge, who found it overlong). The replayed classics doing the heavy lifting are the ones you already love: Steve-O and the flying port-a-potty, Knoxville and the raging bull, Knoxville terrorizing golfers with an airhorn.

The part that actually surprised people

Here is the turn. Multiple critics, independently, used the word the franchise has spent a quarter century daring you to feel: tenderness.

Time Out's Sophie Monks Kaufman wrote that the movie "has a melancholic awareness of its own mortality. Really." Gilchrist said "this may be the first time Jackass induces tears that aren't either from laughter or disgust." Singer put it plainest: "the stars of these movies have always been vulnerable; in Best and Last, their pain is as much emotional as it is physical."

Lodge closed his Variety review on the line that explains the 90 percent better than any stunt does: "You leave Jackass: Best and Last believing that they'll actually miss all this, and that's enough to make us miss it too."

There is a real reason this works, and it has nothing to do with stunts getting better. These guys cannot do this forever, and the movie knows it. Knoxville is in his mid-fifties. The body that took the bull in Forever does not bounce back the way it used to, and a few reviewers noted he is visibly more cautious on camera now. When the joke is "look what we can survive," watching the survivors get older changes the joke. That is the thing a clip show can do that a fresh set of stunts cannot. It puts then and now in the same frame.

The catch

One note worth keeping. The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck, who was cooler on the movie than most, ended on the line every Jackass fan should probably tape to the fridge: "The odds that this is truly the final entry feel slim." Knoxville has retired this crew before. "Best and Last" is a title, not a contract.

The verdict

BCN has not been in a screening room with this one yet, so take this as a read on the wave, which is what these early-verdict pieces are for. And the wave is clear and consistent: this is a good Jackass movie that is better at saying goodbye than it is at topping itself.

If you came up with these guys, the back half is going to get you in a way a Jackass movie has no business doing. If you are showing up for new, never-seen insanity, you will get some, but you will also be watching a highlight reel you could mostly cue up at home. The film knows which of those audiences it is really for. It is for the people who are going to miss it.

BCN Score: 78 / 100. A warm, funny, slightly padded farewell that earns its sentiment honestly and falls just short of the franchise's best. Worth the ticket if these idiots ever made you laugh. Bring a strong stomach and lower expectations on the brand-new material.