By Nicole Veneto

Jackass Forever is incredibly stupid, totally irresponsible, completely juvenile, and it made me feel alive in my body for the first time in weeks.

Jackass Forever, directed by Jeff Tremaine. Now playing in theaters.

A scene from Jackass Forever. Photo: Sean Cliver, © Paramount / courtesy Everett Collection

Thanks to both the spike in Omicron and a sudden onslaught of seasonal depression, my 2022 has gotten off to a somewhat rocky start. Like many of us, I’ve grown tired of “the new normal” we’re living in, as Covid winter has effectively made my world a lot smaller and lonelier than it was several months ago. In my last review, I raised the question as to whether we even want to see any representation of the pandemic in the media we consume, ultimately concluding that any iteration of our current reality in visual narrative media is antithetical to the escapism we naturally seek out in our movies and television. Whenever I find myself feeling blue, I tend to turn to old favorites from childhood or adolescence for nostalgic comfort. Although I was too young for Jackass when it originally aired on MTV (2000-2002), I watched quite a lot of it as a teenager in the mid-to-late aughts, thanks to reruns and skateboarder Bam Margera’s spin-off show Viva La Bam. Jackass is a fixture of my youth that I continue to hold near and dear to my heart, whether it’s at the thought of Johnny Knoxville sounding off an air horn at a golf course or Steve-O getting his butt cheeks pierced together.

Over 20 years since it premiered on MTV, Jackass’s impact can still be felt today, from the on-the-street hijinks in The Eric André Show to whatever pranks TikTok teens are doing on the platform for views. Knoxville and the Jackass boys haven’t graced our screens since 2010’s Jackass 3D, which critics received poorly at the time because, well, it was a movie showcasing all the different ways you can hit someone in the testicles. But things have drastically changed in the interim between 2010 and now. Note Forever’s Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes (85% as of this writing). Jackass Forever is incredibly stupid, totally irresponsible, completely juvenile, and it made me feel alive in my body for the first time in weeks. I laughed, I cringed, I may have thrown up in my mouth a little bit. Cliché as it is to say, Jackass Forever is the movie we need right now — a cathartically rambunctious exercise in friendship, potty humor, and grave bodily harm that will cure whatever ails you for 96 minutes.

In lieu of a synopsis, allow me to describe some of the ridiculous stunts and pranks Knoxville and company pull off in Jackass Forever:

• In a hysterical tribute to Godzilla and other kaiju movies, the film opens with a miniature city being destroyed by a giant green lizard, the monster actually being Chris Pontius’s puppeteered dick and balls painted green with a little tail glued to the shaft.

• The Cup Test, which revisits the original Knoxville bit testing the durability of a protective jockstrap against children, croquet balls, and a sledgehammer, this time with Ehren McGhehey taking some hard hits to the nads from heavyweight punches, softballs, hockey pucks, and a pogo-stick.

• The Marching Band, wherein the guys don marching band gear with instruments and walk onto a speeding treadmill, hurling them into the wall behind them one after the other.

• The Electric Tapdance, where Jasper Dolphin, Steve-O, Zach Holmes, Eric Manaka, Dave England, and Poopies try to perform a dance routine barefoot on an electrified stage floor being controlled by Knoxville.

• The Vomitron, which serves as the grand finale, wherein Jasper, Steve-O, Manaka, England, Holmes, and Poopies are strapped into a motorized merry-go-round while drinking a gallon of milk in hopes of puking all over each other. In true Jackass fashion though, there are a few more “explosive” surprises in store for them.

Most of the original Jackass crew (Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, Preston Lacy, Dave England, and Ehren McGhehey) return, certainly older but not necessarily any wiser. New additions to the lineup include Jasper Dolphin (from Adult Swim’s Loiter Squad, another Dickhouse production led by rapper Tyler, the Creator, also in the movie), Zach Holmes, Eric Manaka, Rachel Wolfson (Jackass’s first female member since Stephanie Hodges from the television series), and the scene-stealing Sean “Poopies” McInerney, arguably my favorite newcomer mostly because I can’t help but giggle when I hear his name. Additional guests include fellow prankster Eric André, Jasper’s father Compston “Dark Shark” Wilson, Machine Gun Kelly, and skateboarders Rob Dyrdek and Tony Hawk. However, there are two notable absences from the mayhem: Ryan Dunn, who sadly died in a car accident in 2011 (and to whom Jackass Forever is dedicated) and Bam Margera, who had an ugly falling out with the Jackass gang after Paramount deemed him too much of a liability to the production due to prolonged substance abuse and a series of public breakdowns over the last couple of years. Margera can still be seen in the Marching Band segment, which was filmed before he was officially fired from the film.

A scene from Jackass Forever. Jasper Dolphin (top), Sean “Poopies” McInerney, Johnny Knoxville, Jason “Wee Man” Acuna, Steve-O, Zach Holmes, Tory Belleci, Eric Manaka. Photo: Sean Cliver, © Paramount / courtesy Everett Collection

Speaking as someone who’s always understood Jackass’s crude appeal, I’m fascinated by the overwhelmingly positive critical reception to Forever. Once an object of moral panic to parents across America, Jackass is now being celebrated as both a necessary reprieve from our current reality as well as a subversively queer piece of media that ought to be cherished. The latter conclusion is hardly surprising to me, as Jackass has always functioned as a sort of homoerotic Rube Goldberg machine. It’s a series wherein men — usually in thongs — enact outrageous scenarios where they get to either look at or touch one another’s junk. A queer reading of Jackass outlines an alternative hypermasculinity that delights in gleefully boyish hijinks and strengthening bonds through ritualistic genital abuse. Everything’s all in good fun, whether it’s a donkey kick to the groin or gargling pig semen while your pals cheer you on. Straight as these men claim to be, there’s an undeniable queerness to their antics that’s spiritually akin to the cinematic excursions in bad taste by John Waters and the Dreamlanders. (Waters, who directed Knoxville in his last completed feature film, 2004’s A Dirty Shame, recently told IndieWire that if “[Knoxville] had been around for Pink Flamingos, I would’ve had him eat shit instead of Divine.” High praise indeed!)

Jackass Forever is no different in form and content from either the television show or the first three movies. Cast lineup and increasing production value aside, nothing has fundamentally changed about Jackass. It still delivers the same vicarious joys of watching someone else eat shit (both figuratively and literally) that it did way back in 2002. What has changed is that our lives have become a lot more isolated thanks to a worldwide pandemic. Being able to see Jackass Forever in the theater with a small yet equally enthusiastic audience was a bonding experience I didn’t know I desperately needed. If laughter truly is the best medicine, then Jackass Forever is a miracle elixir.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the new podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and Twitter @kuntsuragi for weird and niche movie recommendations.