One byproduct of getting older is that injuries hurt more and last longer. Inflammation prevents broken bones from knitting themselves back together correctly so that they look like gnarled wood. Old and new traumas compound to create new, mysterious sources of pain. Cells divide lethargically, which slows the closing of cuts and healing of bruises. Some cells even grow senescent, forgetting how to replicate at all.
Johnny Knoxville’s body knows those lessons all too well. The 55-year old “Jackass” ringmaster does a lot fewer stunts that he used to. In the 2022 film “Jackass Forever,” he gets hooked and tossed by an enraged bull, going heels over his now-silver head. He suffered a concussion and a brain hemorrhage, leading doctors to bar him from stepping into the arena with enraged bovines. There are no bulls in “Jackass: Best and Last,” a film being billed as the final installment of a three-decade project to see how badly a group of friends can get themselves injured while having fun and not dying.
It all started nearly 30 years ago, when a teenager named Bam Margera and his crew of friends in suburban southeast Pennsylvania started putting out a series of homespun skateboarder VHS tapes called “CKY,” which mixed footage of kickflips over trash cans with stunts like jumping off a two-story building into a dumpster. In the abridged version of the story, Knoxville, the director Spike Jonze and Jeff Tremaine, editor of the iconoclastic skateboard magazine “Big Brother,” saw the videos and recognized the potential entertainment value in pain. They met with Margera, shot some demo footage and sold the concept to MTV.
