Romantic's Blog

Talk about an almost entirely self-explanatory title to an almost entirely review-proof movie. Yes, it's "Jackass." The lovable (to some) crew made up almost entirely by male scalawags and led by charismatic Southern rogue prankster Johnny Knoxville reunites to: hit each other; taunt various strong-backed and easily provoked farm animals; improvise various ill-advised and largely ad hoc-seeming stunts; and play with fecal matter and urine in a fashion that would stupefy Freud into doing a major reassessment of just when the infantile stage is exhausted in the white male's development. Only this time, a full 10 years after the debut of the original MTV series that has thus far spawned three one-hesitates-to-call-them-"feature" films, they're shown doing it all in 3-D. In "Jackass 3-D," it's a development that is explained in an amusing, albeit entirely predictable, prologue to the film by Knoxville and Co.'s animated anti-social MTV cohorts, Beavis and Butthead.

Because the now-acclaimed director of hipster-beloved art films Spike Jonze was, and remains, a peripheral member of the "Jackass" cohort; because sometime movie-actor Knoxville has been spotted reading Flannery O'Conner; because the last "Jackass" movie dropped the name of surrealist provocateur Luis Buñuel; because of all this there has been some speculation recently as to whether the "Jackass" project constitute a pop conceptual art coup rather than just a bunch of not-quite-fratty guys with issues engaging in elaborate and pointless rituals of self-abuse. My own question is, well, what's the difference anyway?


Some of the most interesting stuff in the movie happens before the assembled do things such as stand in the path of a small jet's exhaust, or run through a corridor booby-trapped with hanging stun guns and cattle prods. "Why do I have to be Steve-O," an underwear-clad Steve-O laments at the start of a segment called "Tee Ball," and just guess what happens in it. (In case you can't, I'll tell you: Mr. O takes a wiffle ball bat to the crotch.) After enacting a literal demonstration of the Roger Miller song "You Can't Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd," Knoxville, having unsurprisingly had the wind knocked out of him by a charging buffalo, is asked what it felt like. "It felt like s---," Knoxville replies. "It felt like I got run over by a buffalo." Well, all right then.
The gross-outs -- the film's climax, such as it is, involves a bungee-propelled, feces-filled Porta-Potty shot into midair with Mr. O inside it -- are often such that they cause the fellas not directly involved no little spiritual discomfort, to the extent that they themselves vomit in sympathy with their victims. Whether one enjoys witnessing their antics or not -- and this is, in case you haven't figured it out by now, a matter both of taste and of tolerance for what some might deem to be direly slipping cultural and behavioral mores -- one should be, I suppose, very glad that one doesn't actually have to hang out with these fellows, their obvious camaraderie notwithstanding.
As for the 3-D, it doesn't add a whole hell of a lot here, although the objects shown coming at you from the screen are more often than not such that ducking would be a completely understandable response.