Who ever imagined, back when we were all younger and less weary, that we’d be getting a new “Jackass” film in the year 2026? When the first big-screen spinoff of this quintessentially turn-of-the-millennium franchise hit screens in 2002, you wouldn’t have counted on Johnny Knoxville even living past 30 — much less still submitting, decades later, to raging bulls and grievous genital peril in the name of comedy. To be fair, he and the whole Jackass gang probably wouldn’t have done, either. Which is partly what gives “Jackass: Best and Last,” the extreme slapstick troupe’s sixth and officially final film, its charm: Every one of the group’s stupid, juvenile stunts is underpinned by an enduring, exhilarated disbelief that they still get to do this for a living, and that we still want to watch.
And we do, even if “Jackass: Best and Last” — essentially a greatest-hits compilation interspersed with new and previously unaired footage — suggests that retirement wouldn’t be the worst idea. Concussions literally hit different in your fifties, after all: The appeal of “Jackass” has always combined giddy hilarity with some degree of aghast concern for the performers’ well-being, but you don’t want the latter overtaking the former. Still, there’s poignancy here in seeing the guys’ middle-aged bodies marked by the wear and tear of their peculiar chosen profession, alongside various fading joke tattoos that seemed funnier a quarter-century ago, as they take yet another voluntary beating. Admittedly, “poignancy” is not a word you’d have ever applied to this franchise in its earlier days. Either they’ve grown, or we have.
