Jackass: Best and Last (2026)

R.  You knew it was R, right?  There's literal cursing in the title.  There's so much nudity and vulgarity piled on top of people doing horrible things to bodies, both their own and others.  Like, I can't even start to explain if there are a straight five minutes where I could show someone without something incredibly (and comedically) horrific happening to someone.  Oh!  Don't forget about the bodily fluids.  There is actual vomit and feces all over this film.  Trust me, we should be lucky to only have an R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Tremaine

I had a film class student ask me once, "How do you write about a Jackass movie?"  From his perspective, admittedly, he was in a much bigger pickle than I am.  He decided to binge all of them and write about the movies individually and that sounds like a hot nightmare.  I do think that there are smart things to say about the Jackass films.  Heck, if I was really in an amazing headspace and was given enough distance between films, I'm sure I could scrounge up some words to explore each of these films.  But I'm super glad that I'm probably only writing about what should be the last Jackass film.  (Unless, of course, I've written about the other ones...which actually probably scans because I've seen those other movies when they came out.)

Perhaps this might be the commentary about the death of Gen X and elder Millennial culture.  Listen, I loved me some Jackass back in the day.  I really did.  Much of my high school career were friends coming over and just binging Jackass episodes one-after-the-other.  I have the DVDs of the show.  These were our counter-culture (oddly enough, by embracing something that made MTV a lot of money).  And I'll tell you what.  I'm in my forties right now.  These guys?  Significantly older.  And every time one of these things comes out, I watch them.  It's not even a FOMO situation.  In fact, people would probably be comforted by the notion that I finally decided to sit a Jackass entry out.  But, man, I don't think I've ever gotten sad by a Jackass movie before.  That kind of changed.

And it's not because of what the movie wanted me to feel.  Maybe it's exactly what I was supposed to be feeling.  One of the things that I kind of appreciate about Best and Last is the fact that it might be one of few moments, separated from the loss of Ryan Dunn, that the Jackass crew --in particularly Johnny Knoxville -- breathed vulnerability into one of their movies.  I should be celebrating this.  Johnny Knoxville wants us to be as sad as he is.  The problem is...this movie probably shouldn't exist.  I'm going to start with my easy, softball argument for this first.  The movie ends with Knoxville strapped to the electric chair that they built for the movie. (I love how this is how I'm about to talk about vulnerability, with a commentary about the electric chair that they built.) The conceit is that the chair acts as a lie detector, shocking Knoxville every time he strays from truth.  But he seems genuinely sad that this is their last Jackass experience ever.  We're supposed to be moved by this, until the joke quickly follows with "You said that every time." 

Okay, that's the easy one.  Now the tough one.  The thing that I liked about Jackass was that it was an insight into a party-hard lifestyle that I never got into nor ever would.  It was living this life vicariously.  When Jackass gave the warning at the beginning of the episodes or the movie about my dumb little buddies trying to emulate these stunts, they really didn't have to tell me twice.  I wasn't even drinking while watching these.  I was enjoying a Mountain Dew or a Surge at best.  I wanted to watch these guys show the fun side of a carefree lifestyle while I was busy memorizing lines for the school play.  It all seemed so care free.  Like, I got the humor, but I was never at risk of being punished for being one of their friends.

But the movie started off with the homemade pitch for Jackass and that thing was upsetting.  The first ever Jackass stunt was Johnny Knoxville, then nicknamed "PJ", having to shoot himself at point blank range.  He's wearing kevlar and he stuffed that bulletproof vest full of adult magazines.  But unlike with the other stunts, where there is at least a modicum of thought put into the stunts (I acknowledge that a lot of them are deadly, but at least there was some concern for the life of the stuntman), it just seems like Johnny Knoxville was cool with killing himself.  You can see it in his eyes.  He has no idea if he's going to survive this.  It's not like, in his mind, that this was a situation where he's fairly confident that he's going to be fine.  No, this feels like a 50/50.  The laughter afterwards wasn't because the stunt was funny.  The laughter was because it seemed like he had to live another day and that was beyond his comprehension.

So to watch this farewell tour of the Jackass crew after that moment was incredibly sobering.  I can't lie.  Eventually, the stunts get so absurd, that I got out of my funk.  But every time there was a moment of melancholy or downtime, I went back to that time in the woods when Johnny Knoxville thought that he was killing himself.  I don't like that.  I worry about them.  Now, these guys haven't been free of controversy or personal drama since the start of this show so many years ago.  Steve-O got put into rehab.  Ryan Dunn died.  Bam Margera doesn't actually have any new content in this movie because his life is a genuine mess. If the point of Jackass was to have some escapism with some of my hard partying friends, Best and Last almost is the most painful thing to watch because it brought up the most obvious thing in the world:  nothing that they're doing is all that fun.  Yeah, it's funny because we know it didn't kill them.  But this is the movie that recontextualized a lot of what I found to be simply a good time.  Is that how I want to dismount?

The funny thing is, I think I've watched a lot of my franchises all address the notion of aging.  Heck, I just showed my two older kids Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a film whose central motif is Kirk dealing with aging while confronting the ghosts of his past.  But I don't think I've ever seen a movie that is so fundamentally about aging while putting the notion of aging as kind of an afterthought.  Jackass exists despite of itself.  At their prime, these guys shouldn't have been doing any of this stuff.  But all of these dudes (with the exception of Chris Pontius, who must have a horrid looking painting in his attic) look ancient.  Sure, some of it comes with hard lifestyles (and even keeping that in mind, they look better than they should in a lot of cases, especially Knoxville, whose age is betrayed by white hair).  But we're watching them blow themselves up and, golly, I sit the wrong way and I can't get up the next day.

There is something superhuman about the way that these guys rebound from injury.  Like, how is Steve-O alive?  That's a question I kind of ask myself a lot.  Perhaps there's a need for this movie to be successful?  Do these guys need this to have any sense of purpose or relevance in the world?  Maybe that sense of relevance is part of why Bam can't be part of this story.  I know that he processed Dunn's death the hardest.  But it almost feels like Bam Margera not being in this movie is part of an ongoing intervention.  It's a bummer, because the movie reminds us that Margera was foundational to the whole Jackass experience.

I want to talk about the thing that annoyed me most about the movie and I have a two-pronged take on this.  The Bam Margera stuff?  The reason that I was thinking about him for the entire movie was because this was a clip show.  Sure, it was done under the guise of a celebration of the long history of Jackass.  I get it.  It's nice...on paper.  But ultimately it's a clip show and I've seen a lot of these clips.  Remember, I had the DVDs.  But the bigger issue is that it almost demonstrates how desperate that these guys are to hold onto something that is so gosh-darned ephemeral.  (Just because the title is a curse word doesn't mean that I have to swear.) There's a clip from back in the day where Steve-O is angry with the guys.  He doesn't want to stick a toy car up his butt.  Don't worry, I get it.  Neither do I.  He's so angry and you don't often see that.  We get that probably happened a lot.  I got the vibe that Englund and Preston Lacy also had those moments, but it is rare to get it from Steve-O.  In that moment, he's so afraid of the myriad of things that could happen with the car up his butt that he's borderline torpedoing his career with this franchise. 

Now, juxtaposition is a bear because in present day, Steve-O takes a prostate exam from a robot with sharp edges.  No fear. No nothing.  We watch him squirm in the most pain ever and this old man is just getting ripped apart down there.  It's very funny for the Jackass crowd.  But it's also incredibly depressing at the same time.  (I mean, they're absolutely brilliant for having off-camera commentary by the "robot", which makes the entire thing very entertaining.) Like, instead of leaving it well alone and having lines that they won't cross, we have a painful as heck moment where there's no even trepidation for what is about to happen to Steve-O.  I kind of like the idea that these moments are somehow new and anxiety-inducing.  Instead, it's just kind of...gross?  I don't know.  I'm overanalyzing.

I'm also genuinely worried about Poopies.  Besides his name being hilarious, he doesn't seem all there.  It kind of feels like they're taking advantage of this guy.  

I don't know.  I didn't love it.  How about this?  It's my least favorite one, despite having Best in the title.  Between the clip show element feeling like this was a cheaper episode and the fact that there are some actually upsetting moments in this one, it felt like this one was not the one that we should have dismounted on.