It is entirely possible to be a humanist who decries needless pain and the cruelties of thoughtless pranks and also love everything that the Jackass media empire stands for. Perhaps it’s an admiration for lunkheaded endurance. Maybe it’s the palpable camaraderie you feel watching this Chaucerian band of miscreants get into all sorts of shenanigans. Maybe it’s the Lunchable-size catharses that you get every few minutes. But Jackass is as Jackass does, and the crew still brings enthusiasm through the stank, sweat and broken bones that abound.
Given the prudish nature of the modern superhero-driven box office, Jackass Forever deserves a great deal of credit for serving up a surprising array of butts, balls and dong than any other English-language film in ages. Never sleazy and always happy to wallow in all the Freudian stages of development, this film is a journey into how friendship gets defined, and also how the impulse to impress/horrify your buddies can lead to all sorts of possibilities.
The new generation of Jackasses joining Johnny Knoxville and the rest are game and diverse and already deploying strong and endearing personalities, with Odd Future’s Jasper Dolphin (and his endearingly funny father, Dark Shark), Too Stupid to Die’s Zach Holmes (an inspiration for all fat guys to be a bit more fearless) and Fail News’ Rachel Wolfson making big impressions. Wolfson hints at a whole other angle for the series’ polymorphous perversity with some trenchant satire (and a lesson in arachnid-related consent) in her Scorpion Botox stunt. Particularly gung-ho for anything is Sean “Poopies” McInerney, who looks like he could be the best friend on any CW show but whose instincts are far too weird to do so.
They all go through it, and nothing here is going to change your mind if you’ve never been a Jackass fan before. But there’s something reassuring about the ritual of these films, and how suffering yields laughter and community. There’s such a great deal of gross imagination on display that you just have to respect what you see before you. At their best, the Jackass films are like a warm beer-fueled collision between Salò and those old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney “let’s put on a show” musicals, particularly with the array of special guest stars who pop in (including a beloved former Nashvillian who got an audience response equivalent to when Andrew Garfield showed up in that last Spider-Man picture).
The death of Rip Taylor (a presence in the previous films) raised a question as to how the film (and the Jackass crew) would reaffirm their ongoing allyship with the queer community — hats off to Tyler the Creator for doing so with wit and fire. Nobody has sex in the Jackass universe, but pretty much everything else is on the table, invariably inventing some new fetishes with each new film, leaving a whole new generation of viewers to figure out new aspects of themselves. The always endearing "Party Boy" Chris Pontius has now become the elder statesman of Anything That Moves bisexual energy. And "Danger" Ehren McGhehey steps up and becomes an icon for masochists, submissives and the unconventionally kinky with this film.
A lot has happened in the intervening decade since the transcendently perverse Jackass 3D. The 2011 death of (personal favorite troupe member) Ryan Dunn casts an inescapable pall over the proceedings, and the absence of Bam Margera following a particularly ugly legal battle is deeply felt to anyone who has been a fan of the Jackass experience. But early on, in an insightful and pensive moment, Steve-O remarks upon how part three is built on the contrast between the fresh-faced deviants who started things back in 2000 (and even a tad before that with the CKY videos) and their then-current 2010 selves, and now they’re another decade past that. The passage of time isn’t dwelled upon, but is widely apparent throughout the fleet Forever. Not for nothing does Knoxville’s anxiousness over his bald spot find its way through the laughs to hit the average Gen-X dude viewer in the gut. It's subtler than the staggering array of genital trauma featured throughout the film, but just as intense and inescapable, its own ticking clock amid the abrasions, bite wounds and jockstraps.
