Jackass: Best and Last, the fifth and purportedly last major film in the Jackass franchise, starts at the very beginning. It’s 1998, and Johnny Knoxville, as youthful and handsome as he ever was, stands in a desolate clearing in the woods. He’s wearing a cheapo bulletproof vest covered by a white T-shirt marked with a crude bull’s-eye, and fiddling with a Smith & Wesson pistol. If you’re familiar with Knoxville’s schtick, you won’t be surprised to learn that he plans to shoot himself in the chest. Why? To see what it feels like. 

As will be the case with a great many Jackass stunts in the coming quarter-century, this one doesn’t go to plan—at first, anyway. The gun is a five-shooter, so instead of one and done, the silence following the click of the trigger means Knoxville has to pull it again. He does, but again, nothing. By accident, Knoxville has found himself playing the world’s silliest game of Russian roulette. Needless to say, Knoxville survives, escaping with little more than burn marks on his T-shirt. It’s perverse to say that it is anticlimactic, but such is the conundrum of the Jackass viewing experience: the worst-case scenario lurks just out of frame, and the fun lies in seeing just how narrowly the gang escapes it.

In some ways Jackass: Best and Last (directed, as with all previous entries, by Jeff Tremaine) is an anticlimax in itself. Like its predecessor, Jackass Forever (2022), it’s mostly made up of footage and outtakes from previous installments and TV episodes (including that grisly opening scene, which went unaired until now); it’s a victory lap rather than an incubator for new and ingenious forms of self-torture. In her Film Comment review of Jackass Forever, Madeline Whittle astutely observed that every entry in this beloved series is a time-stamped document of its hard-ridden, aging makers. Best and Last still finds novel ways to inflict damage on Knoxville and co., but those are cast in sharp relief to observations like who has longer, grayer hair; who is missing another tooth; or who is missing altogether. 

When the newly 50-year-old Steve-O gets probed by a humanoid robot, its angular finger primed with nothing more than a dry condom and peanut butter; or, later, when Steve-O, Preston Lacy, Dave England, and Chris Pontius gulp down colonoscopy-grade laxatives and play a game of “human pretzel,” what previously might have been satisfying merely as gross-out stunts—it’s not long before the pretzel is covered in chocolate—now carry greater thematic weight.

Much has been made of the Keatonesque nature of Jackass stunts—indeed, the silent comic’s name appears in an almost never-ending list of thank-yous in Best and Last’s end credits, alongside tit-for-tat specialists Tom and Jerry. But to me, these gags have always felt Hawksian, and never more so than in this ultimate entry. Love and respect are earned through tests of mettle; jeers and trash talk precede the inevitable hugs and kisses. The mere mention of this being the gang’s last hurrah sends Knoxville—the man who has gleefully taken jet ski handlebars  to the balls, snake fangs to the veins, and all manner of gastrointestinal by-products to the face—into a lip-quivering sputter. If one Jackass ethos is to explore the very limits of the human body’s tolerance for pain and discomfort, then another is to show us the homosocial bonds that make it all worthwhile.