Directed By Jeff Tremaine

Starring – Johnny Knoxville, Chris Pontius, Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuna

The Plot – Johnny Knoxville and the gang return for one final fling at the big screen. Featuring all-new stunts and stupidity along with the greatest hits and biggest laughs from the past, Jackass: Best and Last is a joyously raucous celebration of all the mischievous camaraderie that you’ve come to love and expect from these idiots over the past 25 years.

Rated R for extremely dangerous stunts and crude material throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language and sexual material.

jackass: best and last | Official Trailer (2026 Movie)

POSITIVES

For those of us who grew up with Jackass, before the dawn of Youtube, the show represented the previously unexplored limits of everyday slackers testing the extents of their bodily resiliency, and while the film does offer us another opportunity to engage in their various methods for torture, it’s also the corroborated final film that serves as a bittersweet celebration of every cherished moment of the past 25 years. When you consider that most of this collective ensemble are around the fifty-year-old mark, it’s downright remarkable in the kind of fearlessness and appreciation for artistry that they each maintain in continuously throwing their bodies in harms way, all for the sake of entertaining masses with whom they’ll never experience first-hand. The gags and individual set pieces themselves considerably lack from previous installments of the cast’s youth able to absorb the sting of their devastation, but even in documenting their respective commitment to delivery, the stakes feel bigger and bolder than any of the four films that came before it, conjuring a far greater impact and hilariously fearful response to what they’re experiencing, even as most of the objectives feel glaringly transparent from the start. As expected, the film’s delve down Memory Lane certainly offers a cementation of legacy that has taken its adolescently-dominated fanbase into adulthood, but even beyond that, a fully realized underlining element of emotionality that draws us closer to the finish with each passing minute of the smoothly seamless 87-minute runtime, with the ending credits once again offering a stirringly sentimental reminder of the good times among surrounding friends that felt like a warm blanket of comfort, each time I pressed play to lose myself in the ridiculousness. This not only stems as a result of the crew themselves forced to say goodbye to us and one another, but also in the responsibly respectful way that they homage their dearly departed brother, Ryan Dunn, with ample adoration that stretches limitlessly to anyone who had the pleasure of knowing him, and for a movie involving robotic reach-arounds, anal fisting, and Botox lip enhancements, I was taken aback by the rock of remorsefulness in my throat that maintained an unshakeable influence towards the overall interpretation, where another piece of my withering adolescence faded away like the very memories that grow foggily with each passing day. Aside from a thorough undercurrent of emotionality, the film also enacts more of an amateur production to its documentation and aforementioned gags, in order to reflect more of the televised origins of their gritty captivity, where more man-made creativity is utilized, instead of the latest camera technology or three-dimensional capability. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that Best and Last is an eye sore to big screen projection, it does distill a greater sense of satisfaction whenever one of these conceptual devices works perfectly against unforeseen elements of an environment, especially one such set piece pertaining to holding the cast’s fattest member over the head of another castmate, in which the suspense of the situation is drawn from the straps that feel like they could and should snap at any given moment. Because everything that Jackass conjures is made up practically and on-the-spot, there’s an elemental imperfection that allows ample opportunity for unpredictable errors, allowing an intriguing x-factor that could never be performed to perfection, yet attained effectively in garnering more than a few long-winded laughs in exploiting each of the cast’s vulnerabilities. In terms of the cast, everybody from the previous film returns once more, even if the group’s unresolved issues with Bam Margera still unfortunately keep him from riding off into the sunset with the franchise that he helped make a household name, and considering Steve-O mentions during the film that he cements a Most Valuable Player to each movie of the series, it made me seek one out for my engagement, and it’s a fitting achievement considering it’s arguably the most underappreciated member of the entire cast: Danger Ehren McGhehey. While Ehren has certainly lived through more dangerous stunts or humiliating bombshells, the film effectively illustrates a valued adaptability that admirably sees him shake himself off in every overwhelming situation, in turn leading to a consistent dependability in laughs that value him much deeper than any of the previous films before this one, and the kind that sees him in more skits than any single member among his co-stars. Lastly, like the previous installments in this franchise, not enough love and respect is paid to its seamlessly stitched together editing techniques, where literally hundreds of hours of film are spliced together to transpire clarity and cohesion to stunts that are enacted with as many as four different cameras at all times. The artists responsible for this Herculean task are none other than Matthew Kosinski, Matthew Probst, Ian Kornbluth, and Jeff Buchanan, who each deviate seamlessly between varied proximity, in ways that never feel contentious or frustrating in the audience’s visual navigation, instead working instinctually impulsively along with the motions of the performers, in redeeming ways that utilize slow motion replays, which typically render a deeper appreciation over the magnitude of stunts that occasionally can’t be realized in real time.

NEGATIVES

There’s a legitimate possibility that newcomers to the Jackass franchise will enjoy this installment even more than its longest and most hardcore fans, particularly as a result of a uniquely underwhelming framing device that was marketed in the movie’s accommodating trailers, but one that I wasn’t ready to accept with open arms. Instead of being another Jackass installment to the franchise, involving entirely new stunts, the film in reality is actually half that and half a retrospective of past stunts and unaired footage that make up an overwhelming majority of the movie’s focus, and one that feels cheaply inferior to anyone expecting an engagement with fresh material. Part of this is understandable as the guys certainly aren’t as young and resilient as they once were, and I would commend the flashbacks if they were entirely comprised of never-before-seen material, but because so much of these stunts are ones that I frequently revisit as a Jackass enthusiast, it feels like it pads the runtime as a project that feels more like Jackass 4.75 (There’s already a Jackass 4.5) rather than a fifth installment that stands on its own feet against predecessors, leaving in reality only around forty-five minutes of fresh material, the likes of which aren’t anywhere near as enticing or provocative as some of the riskiest material in those previous films. This transitions seamlessly into my second glaring problem with the film, in which there feels like such little risk or originality to reheated stunts that feel inferiority siblings of similarly constructed past stunts that were enacted superiorly to these, resulting in my biggest laughs and enjoyment of the film stemming from those aforementioned delves down Memory Lane, instead of those enacted in this film. The closest that this film has to a freshly compelling angle involves an android robot named Larry, whose addition to the cast is utilized in two different skits, where only the first of which makes him vital to a stunt’s integrity. So there’s this immediate sense of wasteful excess in an inhuman character with limitless possibilities to what’s incapably explored, leaving it and the rest of the seemingly unrealized ideas from previous films, deposited to a film that I saw less than an hour ago, involving a lack of digestible memorability to my interpretation. The closest that the film gets to a compelling new angle pertains to gross-out humor involving four of the male members donning sweat suits while drinking the very same bowel prep used for colonic cleansing. The gag itself is certainly nothing new for this juvenile bunch, as one of them has already drank a sweat cocktail from another man’s ass, but it does present the single most shocking visuals of the entire film, and considering so much of the Jackass experience grows tediously redundant on shocking visuals that immediately desensitize their audience, it doesn’t feel anything out of the ordinary for what’s expected, instead surmising phoned-in gags that lack the edginess of what’s required to hook an audience. Finally, similar to my critiques on Jackass Forever, there’s such a glaringly evident imbalance among the usage of the cast that makes a lot of them feel like cheerleaders to a stunt’s undertaking, most obviously Rachel Wolfson, who isn’t used as a talent in a single one of the skits throughout the movie. For the very life of me, I will never understand how this franchise has failed to capitalize twice on a uniquely original angle that no other male member can capably recreate, especially considering Wolfson herself elaborated years ago how anxious she was to get her hands dirty, and considering she does less work than an absent Margera, on account of the movie’s various flashbacks to past stunts, it undervalues her in ways that are inexcusable in any capacity, making her not necessarily the only misused member, but certainly the biggest offender of the bunch.

OVERALL
Jackass: Best and Last might be a manipulative bait and switch of greatest hits that serves as a regurgitated retrospective down Memory Lane instead of a fifth installment to the franchise, but its genuinely poignant underlining and sense of collective comradery for commitment, wields one more day in the sun with our favorite daredevils, and one in which the film serves as a bittersweet goodbye to a generation of television that will always be imitated but never quite duplicated.

My Grade: 7.1 or B-