By Patrick Cremona

Published: Wednesday, 02 February 2022 at 12:00 am


3.0 out of 5 star rating

Around halfway through Jackass Forever, the latest instalment of the long-running prank and stunt series, Johnny Knoxville turns to the camera and says with a massive grin: “Twenty years later, and we’re still doing the same stupid s**t!”  And to be frank, that remark just about covers everything you’d really need from a review of this film – it picks up just where the previous entries left off, and will give fans of the franchise more or less exactly what they crave.

Knoxville and most of his usual collaborators, including Steve O, Wee Man and Chris Pontius (but notably not Bam Margera) are all back for more, and although they might be approaching 50, there are no signs that any of them have matured one bit since the last time they shared a screen. And that’s just as well: no one turns up at a screening of Jackass expecting anything short of the most puerile, outrageous behaviour imaginable, and on that front, Jackass Forever well and truly delivers.

The film begins with an impressively high-production-value stunt that features what can only be described as a Godzilla penis-puppet, and that rather sets the tone for the hour and a half of anarchic antics that follows. Nothing is off-limits for the crew, and they find themselves up against deadly serpents, swarms of bees, grizzly bears, angry bulls, human cannonballs and huge buckets full of pig semen – while they also suffer all manner of nasty blows to their private parts, sometimes in rather inventive ways.

There are also some more brilliant hidden camera segments, while at various points there are callbacks to the previous films from 20 years ago, as the gang revisit some memorable stunts, including one in which they attempt to ignite a fart underwater, this time with help from an explosives expert. This nostalgia all culminates in a credits sequence where we see several stunts from years gone by alongside more recent pranks – ending in an emotional tribute to former cast member Ryan Dunn, who tragically passed away in 2011.