By Nicole Veneto

A ragged farewell that mixes new stunts with archival scraps as Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of masochists  age out of self-destruction.

The Jackass gang and their newest recruit (Larry the Robot) assemble for Jackass: Best and Last. Photo: Paramount Pictures

I don’t know what it feels like to get hit in the nuts. For one, I don’t have them. But I’ve watched enough Jackass throughout my life to know it’s both painful and pretty funny. That Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of masochists have made lucrative careers out of nut shots is as much a testament to the mass appeal of male roughhousing as it is part of a storied tradition of entertainers willing to endure grave bodily harm for a laugh or a groan. So it might come as a surprise that Jackass didn’t start off with testicular contortions, but with 27 year-old aspiring actor Philip John “PJ” Clapp (stage name Johnny Knoxville) shooting himself in the chest with only a Kevlar vest and a stack of Hustler magazines for protection.

That ultimately unaired stunt is the first thing you see in Jackass: Best and Last, purportedly the final entry in the nearly thirty-year-old Jackass franchise. After 2022’s Jackass Forever served as both a touching (and characteristically gross) celebration of aging and passing of the torch to some newly inducted cast members, it seems Knoxville and Co. are hanging up their poop/puke/god-knows-what stained towels for good. This feature-length swan song is part Greatest Hits compilation of part unseen stunts from previous films, and a helping of new stuff that made me laugh, cringe, and gag a little bit. The result is arguably the weakest of the Jackass movies that nonetheless coasts on the joy of hanging out with your old (emphasis on old) friends again.

In keeping with Jackass Forever’s ode to getting older, a decent chunk of the newly shot footage for Best and Last plays with the demarcators of male aging, such as Steve-O undergoing a robot-assisted prostate exam and a game of Diarrhea Twister with colonoscopy laxatives (spoiler: Steve-O wins, and it’s really quite foul). Higher concept bits like a “Virtual Insanity”-inspired opener, a human marionette show, and an “Escape Room from Hell” make the most of the franchise’s post-Jackass: The Movie production levels. Yet it’s still the simpler shenanigans that draw on shock collars, muscle stimulants, and good old-fashioned nut shots that remain the most effective. Jackass’s bread and butter has always been the sort of easily repeatable, skate video mischief that’s sent countless impressionable teenage boys to the emergency room despite legally required disclaimers. Recruiting Paul Walter Hauser (of all people) for a trivia game that ends with someone being suffocated by Zach Holmes’ butt cheeks is hilarious. But there’s truly no substitute for watching someone step on a rake.

Johnny Knoxville, right, with Chris Pontius (and a ram) in Jackass: Best and Last. Photo: Paramount Pictures

To be generous, the new stuff accounts for maybe 40% of the runtime if you include the unseen footage shot with Bam Margera for Jackass Forever before he was fired. (After some messy litigation, Margera seems to have patched things up with Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine — he’s still about as involved here as the long-deceased Ryan Dunn.) Still, for the most part, Best and Last is a theatrical clip-show episode, loosely structured around the original cast wistfully recalling their glory days. Best and Last likely started production as a proper Jackass sequel that came up short, necessitating archival material to pad out a contractually obligated film to feature length. That impression is undeniable, considering the marginal roles most of the newer cast serve here (save for Poopies, of course). Jasper and his dad Compston “Dark Shark” Wilson mostly stand around and giggle. And poor Rachel Wolfson has even less to do, despite proving her worth as the sole female Jackass-er in Forever.

Even though the junior members could have pulled more weight, there’s a perfectly understandable and practical reason for the clip show format — the Jackass OGs are getting too old for this shit. Knoxville takes a noticeable step back from physical stunt work to act as master of ceremonies. In fact, there’s a very good reason MTV’s resident Evel Knievel isn’t putting himself through the ringer. While filming the “Magic Trick” stunt for Forever, Knoxville suffered a nearly fatal brain hemorrhage after being gored by a bull, included here in full, alongside an unused first take that wasn’t up to his standards. The man who started his career with a literal bang and survived all sorts of close encounters with death will probably drop dead if he gets hit in the head one more time. Hits to the groin, however, are fair game.

There’s also an elephant in the room when it comes to recent goings-on at parent company Paramount. This is just my suspicion, but the sudden announcement of Best and Last as the final Jackass entry earlier this year corresponds with Paramount’s politically motivated and all-but-finalized acquisition of Warner Bros. (CEO, failed actor, and billionaire nepo-baby David Ellison took control in 2024 with the Paramount-Skydance merger, two years after Jackass Forever was released.) For a franchise that’s as beloved, queer-friendly, and profitable as Jackass is, I can’t help but wonder if Knoxville and Tremaine are putting their life’s work to bed as a preventative measure, to ward off Ellison getting his greedy little fascist hands on it. I don’t want to live in a world where Jackass continues on as a shuffling corpse that endears itself to chuds. Can’t imagine they’d like that either.

Whatever the reasons for Best and Last being what it is, the film marks the passage of time with a poignancy no movie with explosive diarrhea or sagging ballsacks conceivably should. It’s not just that the Jackass oldheads are facing their own mortality with greying hair and wrinkles. The pre-YouTube generation, which counts watching Jackass as a formative preteen experience, is now older than Knoxville was when he tested out self-defense equipment for a Big Brother magazine article. The past only exists in archival footage of grown men crashing shopping carts in parking lots. But for all the things that have changed — the color of Knoxville’s mane, regime change at Paramount, the very existence of MTV as we knew it — plenty remains the same. Lance Bangs is still puking behind the camera, Chris Pontius loves being butt ass naked, and Knoxville’s impish cackle is as infectious as ever. Jackass: Best and Last is a eulogy only a group of aging shitheads who’ve smelt and dealt it together can give.

Nicole Veneto is a locally revered abject woman and acclaimed millennial hag with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Brandeis University, where she concentrated 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 podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema and a features programmer for the Boston Underground Film Festival. You can follow her on Letterboxd, Substack, and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.