More than 20 years after Jackass premiered on MTV, the moral panic that greeted the show’s mash-up of self-abusing stunts, hidden-camera pranks, and general antisocial belligerence now seems almost quaint. Indeed, one of the most ironic aspects of Jeff Tremaine’s Jackass Forever is that production on this film filled with ill-advised stunts risking grievous bodily harm was halted for several months out of safety concerns created by the pandemic, and many scenes feature the cast and crew wearing face masks. It’s a lot harder to wring one’s hands about these guys representing some kind of cultural decline when they behave more responsibly than the average small business owner.
Besides the visible indications of pandemic protocols, the most immediately arresting sight in this belated fourth installment in the Jackass film series is how the actors have aged since Jackass 3D. Johnny Knoxville, 49 at the time of filming, sports a tuft of completely silver hair, while a now-sober Steve-O oozes the jittery weariness of a recovering addict. Taken in tandem with notable absences (Ryan Dunn died in 2010, while Bam Margera was acrimoniously fired from this film during production), these signs of time’s passage bring an extra edge to the ever-dangerous stunts, and the performers are candid about their concerns for themselves and each other as they put yet more hard miles on beat-up, middle-aged bodies.
The Jackass crew speaks honestly about the toll that this franchise has taken on them, and Jackass Forever has the feeling of a farewell in its unabashed nostalgia, with the performers updating a number of gags from the TV show and prior films. Most of these, of course, involve inventive ways for the men to torture their dicks. From forcing poor Danger Ehren to endure a series of cup “tests” to encouraging a vulture to eat rotting meat off of Wee Man’s g-string, the film is a symphony of throwback and all-new genital abuse. There are so many close-ups on bruised and battered—and, in one wild scene involving Steve-O, bee-stung—testicles that they become almost a kind of abstract transitional device, akin to an Ozu pillow shot.
Elsewhere, the gags range from the painfully simple to the wildly elaborate. On the former front, the guys ride bikes and skateboards over wood planks that have been placed atop their buddies inside makeshift ramps. Elsewhere, a winged Knoxville is fired out of a cannon, evoking a carny spin on Icarus. More extravagant is one of the film’s best scenes, which seemingly imagines what it would be like to drop the goofy homemade defensive weapons from Home Alone into Buffalo Bill’s pitch-black lair at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. After Knoxville locks his buddies inside the booby-trapped room, the terrified men skitter around and run into pans, mouse traps, and the like. A few ideas don’t land, most especially the pranks that, more than ever, look overly rehearsed, but Jackass Forever relentlessly marches through its gags with such efficiency that it never lags on a weak punchline.
It’s strange to regard this cavalcade of flesh-welting, head-concussing absurdity and see a contented victory lap, but that’s the overall tone of Jackass Forever. Tellingly, the original cast swells their ranks with a bevy of younger members that include former Odd Future rapper Jasper Dolphin and viral stunt performer Zach Holmes, all of whom take their brutal licks but pop up with unabashed enthusiasm in their faces and gush with each other that they cannot believe that they’re now a part of this thing that they grew up watching on TV.
Jackass has always existed in a larger tapestry of entertainment history that links high- and low-culture touchstones as disparate as silent film comedy, performance art, and backyard wrestling, and there’s even a gag here involving a screen with a lane printed on it that’s right out of Looney Tunes. To see the old-timers pass the torch to their acolytes cements the improbable importance of Jackass in American pop culture, twisting a property that was once considered proof of a nation’s budding nihilism into maybe the strangest-ever celebration of human ingenuity and the lengths that we go to in order to amuse ourselves and others.
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