Jackass: Best and Last

Jackass: Best and Last opened in American theaters June 26, 2026: ninety-two minutes of slapstick sold as the final ride for a crew that spent twenty-five years volunteering for concussions so the rest of us could laugh. The title says Best and Last. The third film sold itself as the finale in 2010. So did Jackass Forever in 2022. By now “goodbye” does not mean much. We have done it before, and the last two times were better movies.

Twenty-six years ago Jackass started as an MTV show in 2000. Friends engineered elaborate, unsettling stunts to injure or embarrass themselves for amusement. Unique idea. One that has burned many millions in insurance premiums. This time the formula shifts: archived never-before-seen footage mixed with greatest hits. Past movies were nearly ninety minutes of new stunts. Here about a quarter is reliving the hits with extra angles, and another quarter is decades-old material that hit the cutting-room floor. Maybe there was a reason it stayed cut.

On the surface the old recordings play like a celebration, a true goodbye. The cynical read is simpler. These guys are in their fifties. More fragile than they were at twenty-five. Archive footage pads the runtime between new bits that lean more disgusting than outright dangerous. A good chunk is footage you have already seen. I am not sure that is worth a theater ticket.

Throughout the film Johnny Knoxville gets brief teary beats about this being the last movie. Played as sincere, and it is sincere. I know people came for the stunts, but I would not have hated two or three more real minutes with him on the conflict of ending it. Knoxville has said publicly that the bull stunt in the previous film gave him a concussion that nearly ended his life. You can see the fragility. They are all fragile. If the movie was already padding with old tape, letting Knoxville and the crew say the grown-up thing out loud would have helped: we grew up, we are still doing Jackass, the audience grew up too. That would have turned padding into a celebration of a life lived instead of what it often feels like: a cash grab riding an era when comedy still had the courage to try to be funny.

The edit plays your heartstrings harder than it plays for laughs. I do not pin that entirely on the crew. The cutting room rigged it: present day, snap to twenty years ago, back to now, back to 2001. You feel those years in your own body. You may stop caring about the disgusting stunt on screen as fifty-year-olds and start remembering buying the Jackass 2 DVD at Circuit City in 2008. That is what this is. People are loving it. Glad you are having a good time. Another Jackass. If you like that irreverent, ridiculous comedy, you will have a blast.

As a reviewer I had a harder time looking past the stunts without feeling the datedness. It started feeling that way in 2022 with Forever: the joke going on too long, ideas running thin. By now the bucket is empty when the credits roll. It plays like looking back on high-school crap and wincing at some of it. Happy we are ready to put it to bed and step into the next chapter.

This series positioned itself as ending sixteen years ago with Jackass 3D. Forever already felt like a cash grab. Jackass 5 absolutely is one. I feel about these movies the way I feel about Toy Story: 3 was an excellent send-off to a great trilogy, 4 pretended to be another goodbye a generation later, and by 5 you realize the goodbyes are just product. Saying farewell twice already drains the third.

Wait for home. No reason to rush a theater. Fun if you already think Jackass is fun. Catch it on streaming. Banished to the Backlog. Six out of 10.