Pour one out for the “Jackass” crew. They’re done. “Jackass: Best and Last” is a sad but fitting end to an extreme stunt franchise that was vanquished not by imagination but time. The fifth and final main installment has all that you’d expect from the Jackass Cinematic Universe — genitalia, electricity, gravity and port-a-potties, often combined. Only this time, the clips from past stunts swamp the new. It begins with a 1998 scene once too shocking to air — head nutcase Johnny Knoxville shooting himself in the chest with a 38-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun, protected only by a Kevlar vest and some girlie magazines for padding. (“Don’t be stupid,” he is told, advice he chooses to ignore for a quarter of a century). The movie ends about an hour and a half later with his merry band of idiots worried about their prostates.
This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Chris Pontius, left, and Johnny Knoxville in a scene from “Jackass: Best and Last.” (Sean Cliver/Paramount Pictures via AP)
Knoxville, badly injured after being rammed by a bull in 2022’s “Jackass Forever” film, is in the new movie recast as a sort of deranged master of ceremonies, wearing a bow tie as he creates bedlam for others but doesn’t partake. He’s like a maniacal Peter Pan sitting out a fight in Neverland.
