Jackass Number Two

Jackass Number Two is far less interested in foisting chaos on an unsuspecting public. Reactions to the film's towering instruments of self-injury rarely stray beyond the central prankster group. So, instead of a skit terminating on an incredulous glance from a middle-aged man, we either get Chris Pontius sputtering something droll or Johnny Knoxville forcing out a wheezing cackle. This self-contained feedback loop - surely the result of a production model that has completely embraced the gang as celebrities - does several of the film's gags a disservice. They measure their various outcomes against a seen-it-all before audience that, frankly, aren't particularly generous with praise. The only upside then is repetition: why waste a pneumatic fist blasting through a hotel corridor wall on one bruised colleague when you can slowly draw in the entire squad?

Thankfully, not every stunt in this sequel is performed in isolation. Knoxville's Irving Zisman interludes - successful enough to spawn their own spin-off movie - see the actor-writer-producer slathered in elderly man make-up and, basically, provoking random members of the public to near-violence. This conceptually mean trick works largely because Knoxville both neatly inhabits this ageing piece of shit and is quick on his feet when exacerbating then deflecting the incoming ire. Similarly, the light confrontation of Spike Jonze's recurring bit as an elderly woman whose clothes are falling apart allows the audience to people watch. Will anyone summon up the courage to tell this doddery old lady that her blouse is open? Number Two's pièce de résistance though is the superbly cruel Terror Taxi, an extended bit in which the Broken Lizard comedy troupe's Jay Chandrasekhar is recruited to kidnap snowboarder Ehren McGhehey - posing as a suicide bomber - then crash him around a car park, believing that several of his friends have been already shot and that he is next. 

Jackass: The Movie

Despite a move to big screen projection, the vast majority of Jackass: The Movie has a home video quality to it. Rather than use the inflated budget - when compared to the television series - to stage complicated locked-down skits, this feature-length experience is made up of planned affronts to the social contract and off-the-cuff incidents captured on shaky DV by the usual documentarians. Really, the biggest indicator of an expanded budget are the brief asides in Japan that are sprinkled throughout the runtime. Jackass: The Movie then preserves the mutant identity minted when an MTV executive looked at several separate skateboarding videos - most notably Big Brother magazines' Number 2 and Bam Margera and Brandon DiCamillo's CKY travelogue tapes - and commissioned their own cheap, slapstick show exploring the apparent invincibility of the young, white American male.

As well as recycling gags from these previous pieces - The Movie opens with Big Brother import Johnny Knoxville leading us through a stockcar pile-up that has roots in the rental car incident from the second CKY cassette - this theatrical adaptation maintains, and is indeed structured to showcase, the peculiarities of this jumbled-up friendship group. Jackass: The Movie provides a safe, solvent space for these young men to strip off and explore their physical limits. The pranks themselves either track the surreal intruding upon humdrum reality or the immediate repercussions of a scatological outrage. Occasionally though, these longform bits muster up a sustained level of discomfort rather than the rush of simple injury. Bam Margera is usually the ringleader for these hassles - his parents (and their mansion) a frequent, impotent target of an animosity that is never reciprocated. 

Similarly, the now sadly departed Ryan Dunn is consistently faced with assignments apparently designed to either broadly humiliate him or specifically attack his masculinity. Whereas Knoxville - the gonzo star - is booked to go the distance against heavyweight boxer Butterbean, in the Ass Kicked by Girl segment Dunn is dressed in a sports bra and tasked with defending himself from the no-less-dangerous champion kickboxer Naoko Kumagai. As blows fly Dunn's way, the rest of the gang laugh and heckle his failing attempts to guard his head from some apparently judged to be inferior, by dint of her gender. Dunn is also the central participant for the finale. Before an audience, who pop in and out of his hotel room, Dunn lubes a condom containing a toy car then inserts it into himself before heading off to a private hospital for an x-ray. The stunt requires a wearily explained fiction to action its outcome, with Dunn questioning, along the way, if his willingness to participate in this particular segment makes him a man in the eyes of his cohorts? He gets some sort of answer later from former flea market clown Steve-O who explains that his father would probably disown him if he allowed himself to be penetrated in this way. If the trials and tribulations of the group whipping boy prove too much then, there's always the skit where Knoxville dresses up as Bill Murray from Caddyshack and blasts increasingly irate golfers with an air horn.