Jackass Forever (2022) September 5th, 2023

Over a decade after Jackass 3D’s release, Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine reunite with most of their original crew (and a handful of new idiots) to relive their glory days of shitting in department store display toilets and letting snakes bite their dicks in Jackass Forever. Like Men in Black and Indiana Jones before it, the Jackass franchise suffers greatly from a lengthy break between releases. Marred by scandal, tragedy, and the realities of old age; Jackass Forever feels like a midlife crisis. One last ride before calling it quits.

In June 2011, just two months after the B-Side DVD Jackass 3.5 released on home video, cast member Ryan Dunn died in a widely publicized automobile crash. Dunn’s death seemed to fracture the Jackass production team, inspiring some to get clean and sober while others spiraled further into substance abuse and despair. During preproduction for Jackass Forever co-creators Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville reportedly gave the struggling Bam Margera a conditional offer to star in the film; get sober and you’re in, don’t and you’re out. Margera refused and spiraled out of control in the ensuing years with publicized police pursuits and a public beef with co-star Steve-O. The offscreen drama hung over Jackass Forever like the suspended contents of a slingshotted Porta-John.

Despite the best attempts of it’s creators, Jackass Forever feels like a gimmick on life support. The few great stunts (Steve-O growing a ‘Bee Beard’ on his genitals, and borrowing Mythbusters’ Tory Bellici to build a tank for lighting farts underwater) were buried by boring stunts featuring new cast members, self-aggrandizing homages to classic stunts, and worse of all the cruelty in tormenting their fellow Jackasses.

What makes Jackass inherently fun is believing everyone involved is in on the joke, willing participants in Caligula’s sadistic circus. That was not the case in my least favorite stunt, the Lie Detector. The set up is cast member Ehren McGhehey takes a polygraph test while wearing a high powered shock collar. Answer a question wrong, and you get a shock. The crew straps his arms into a heavy wooden chair to ensure he doesn’t bail when the jolts start. What Ehren doesn’t know (and hasn’t consented to) is after a few jolts, Johnny Knoxville intends to douse the restrained McGhehey in honey and dump fresh salmon on his crotch before leaving the room and unleashing an adult brown bear on his ‘friend’.

Being unknowingly subjected to this would be bad enough but Ehren keeps his cool while the fish around his penis is eaten by North America’s largest land predator. But Knoxville needs action in this stunt, so he shocks McGhehey with the collar in a cruel attempt to make him squeal and panic in the face of a mauling. The bear’s handlers remove the animal before Ehren is injured but he won’t escape the real monster as long as he works with Johnny Knoxville. Stunts like this aren’t funny, they’re maliciously cruel and profit motivated. If someone isn’t pissing themselves in fear of their life then the movie has no draw, and no trailer moments.

In my opinion this is cowardly behavior on the part of Tremaine and Knoxville who tortured their employee without his consent for laughs and profit. I don’t understand how this is legal and I can imagine a scenario where browbeating, coercion, and even classic bullying could compel an employee with 25 years of Stockholm Syndrome to sign a waiver of some kind. I don’t know what happens behind the scenes on the Jackass set and everything I’ve suggested is speculation, but how much grace does that afford these men?

Jackass Forever was a nice treat that inspired me to rewatch the better films when Ryan Dunn was alive and the most abusive stunt was throwing a snake on an ophidiophobic Bam Margera. If Jackass Forever is the best they could come up with after a decade long hiatus then it’s time to call it quits. Unfortunately it seems like the co-creators knew this going into production and attempted to reinvigorate the cast with a handful of newcomers but none of them have the charm or the drive of the original crew. They’re not as desperate to eat and be on TV as the old timers were in 1998. Without that guerrilla skateboard movie drive Jackass Forever is at worse a PG-13 snuff film and at best a C+ addition to the franchise.