By Jason Osiason

There’s a real tension in making a movie about saying goodbye to bad behavior. Jackass: Best and Last spends its whole runtime negotiating between the two, and it doesn’t always land on the right side even if it’s heart is in the right place.

The shape of the movie is part clip show, part new material, part documentary, and that third piece is the most interesting choice on paper. It opens on genuinely unearthed footage: a 1998 pitch tape of a twenty-something Johnny Knoxville shooting himself in the chest through a cheap bulletproof vest stuffed with porn magazines, the same tape he and Jeff Tremaine used to sell the show to MTV in the first place. It’s a terrific opener, and it sets up an expectation the rest of the film doesn’t fully meet. Too much of what follows is old, familiar highlight-reel material, Butt X-Ray, Silence of the Lambs, Poo Cocktail Supreme, run back with a little new interview color wrapped around it. I wanted more of that pitch-tape instinct: fewer victory laps around bits we’ve already paid to see twice, more of the guys actually explaining how something like that MTV tape got made and turned into a career.

The movie cuts between decades of footage without much signposting, and if you can’t already tell your Jackass 2 from your Jackass 3 on sight, good luck knowing whether you’re watching 2002 or 2026 at any given moment. The rare moments the film does explain itself, like that MTV pitch tape, end up being the strongest material here. I just wanted more of it.

Yes, there’s a lot of butt and prostate humor like the predecessors but this time it’s more complimented toward their age. A robot named Larry giving Steve-O a rectal exam with a peanut-butter-lubed claw. A round of Hot Potato where Zach Holmes gets lowered by crane until his bare ass is in someone’s face. A laxative-fueled game of Twister that ends with someone visibly losing control of his bowels on camera. An escape room stunt built around fishing a coin out of Zach’s rear end. A ping pong ball shot out of Steve-O by main force was one of my favorite standouts. Jackass has always used the male body as a punchline and pushing that all the way down into the prostate and the bowels is just this franchise finishing a joke it’s been building for 26 years.

Some of what doesn’t work here is just age. Knoxville can’t take a hit to the head anymore without real medical risk, the film says so more than once, and it shows. The new stunts lean into fluids and endurance instead of the pure, physics-defying danger that used to make this series feel unpredictable. It plays smaller because of it closer to something you’d stumble onto on HBO Max on a random night than a real theatrical event. As a victory lap for people who’ve followed this cast for two and a half decades, that smaller scale barely costs it anything. But the caution comes with a real cost too: a low hum of sadness runs under the whole movie, and it gets louder every time Bam Margera shows up only in old, unused footage, fired off the last movie and never invited back to shoot anything new, louder still whenever the late Ryan Dunn turns up in a clip and you remember he isn’t around to see any of this.

The new cast splits unevenly for me. Poopies gets real screen time, including a whole running bit about cosmetic lip filler, but he mostly reads as the guy absorbing stunts the original cast is now too old or too smart to take on themselves. He doesn’t generate the spark the editing clearly wants from him. Zach Holmes fares far better smartly as a tool for the new stunts rather than an energized personality. His size makes him the literal instrument of more than one gag here instead of pretending he’s the next great Jackass discovery.

By the end, Best and Last tips too far toward eulogy and not nearly far enough into anarchy. I don’t mind that trade nearly as much as I probably should. The sentimental stretches earn themselves when they’re tied to something specific. What I actually missed wasn’t a stunt, though. It was the unbothered, goofy chaos and that’s the catch-22 of aging alongside these guys: the same restraint that makes the sentimental stuff land is exactly what took the stupid, weightless joy out of everything else. [B-]