Don’t try this at home: Jackass: The Movie reviewed in 2003

When it was first broadcast on MTV in 2000, Jackass quickly established a reputation as a Candid Camera for the gross-out generation. Like many practical-joke shows, Jackass honed in on unsuspecting members of the public, making them the butt of elaborate pranks. But it was the humiliating and painful degrees to which the Jackass gang themselves went for the sake of a laugh that made the series such a cult hit. Memorable skits included Johnny Knoxville, the show’s affable host, wearing a swarm of wasps as underpants thanks to some strategically placed honey; swimming excursions in vats of sewage; and dropping croquet balls from great heights on to barely protected body parts. Aside from a genuinely bizarre prologue shot on film involving an oversized shopping trolley (which bares the surreal imprint of producer Spike Jonze), the movie makes little virtue of its big-screen canvas: this is, essentially, a 90-minute version of the TV show, a scattershot collection of short skits mostly shot on handheld DV cameras.

And like the series, the film plays as if it were the work of unruly frat house members let loose on the world after a rowdy keg party. It’s an impression, one supposes, that the film-makers wouldn’t necessarily disavow. Part of the appeal here is the unfazed, laidback attitude that the various Jackass collaborators apply to their stunts. Despite the Don’t-Try-This-At-Home warning, Knoxville and co trade on a kind of baggy DIY amateurism when approaching even the most dangerous of set-ups. When Steve-O, for instance, gingerly begins a tightrope walk across a pool full of snapping alligators (showing no balancing-act dexterity), his Jackass cohorts excitedly egg on the reptiles. This very lack of contrivance is, of course, as much a stylistic front as any other, and it’s worth noting that Jackass grew out of the West Coast skateboarding scene, where attention-grabbing acts of agility – on evidence throughout – have always been couched in a certain stoner haze.

This said, there’s an unmistakeable edge of pain and physical danger to some of the knockabout, which is perhaps why much of it is so compelling. The stitches that Knoxville sustains, shown in excruciating close-up, having recklessly challenged a heavyweight boxer to a scrap certainly don’t look fake, nor does his pain on being shot in the stomach with an anti-riot bullet. Given mainstream action movies’ preference for clean, CG-assisted stunt work, there’s something satisfyingly old-fashioned about the robust, low-tech body-slamming on display here.

It goes without saying that much of this is pathologically puerile, relentlessly unedifying and in dubious taste, but there are more than enough compensating laugh-out-loud moments (for this viewer, at least). Like most hidden-camera shows, Jackass flatters us by letting us in on the joke. At one point, Knoxville and his camera crew hide in the bushes of a posh golf course, blowing a klaxon to throw the players off guard just as they are about to swing their clubs. The gag hardly scores points for originality, but it works thanks to the giggly sense of complicity we have with Knoxville and his unsteady camera operator. It helps that the victims react to each sting with good humour (one golfer, for instance, ends up shooting balls in the direction of the pranksters, while, in another skit, a shopkeeper manages an adroit putdown after one of the Jackass gang attempts to make off with an armful of stolen goods). The sequence that earned the biggest laughs from the audience I saw the film with was perhaps the simplest: Knoxville screaming in pain as his friends delightedly apply paper cuts to his feet and his hands. What this says about the lengths he’ll go to get a reaction is almost as disturbing as what it says about those of us who laughed.