Jackass 2.5 Review

When it was announced that Paramount Pictures and MTV would be making the latest offering from Johnny Knoxville & Co. available for free download, I was intrigued. It was an interesting way to promote a movie, and I certainly wanted to check it out for my review. Unfortunately, I was caught in the middle of a winter storm and my internet was knocked out all weekend. Lucky for me (and you), I received a copy of Jackass 2.5 in the mail, so I was able to watch it after all.

Before opening the package, the question entered my mind: Do I actually need to review this movie? Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past eight years, you know the cast of the Jackass tv show and films, and if you know who they are and what they’re all about, you already know whether or not you want to watch this movie. I’m not going to convince you that you want to watch a bunch of drunks hit golf balls off of tees perched precariously in their buttholes. If you want to watch these guys fill squirt guns with urine and shoot them at each other, my negative review will do nothing to stop you from doing so. You either like Jackass or you don’t, there isn’t usually much of a middle ground. People generally fall into two camps, those who find the Jackass boys to be humorous and those who find them to be… well, a bunch of jackasses.

The story behind Jackass 2.5 is that they filmed tons of footage for Jackass Number 2, and this is the leftovers. The stuff that didn’t make the cut for a variety of reasons. Actually, as far as I can tell, there’s only two reasons. One is that a lot of this stuff just isn’t that funny. It’s a lot of rehashed jokes that you’ve seen before, or jokes that just didn’t deserve to be in the movie. You pick the best skits for a theatrical release, and the stuff that isn’t good enough gets recycled as a dvd extra or, in this case, another, not-quite-feature-length, movie.

The other reason a lot of this material didn’t make the movie is that it’s really disgusting. I mean, disgusting even by Jackass standards. There’s more puking in this movie, more flatulence, more accidental (and intentional) pooping and more nutsacks in this movie than in any other Jackass movie, and this one is only an hour long!

While it is the most hit-or-miss of the Jackass films, when it hits, it hits hard. I’m not going to act like I didn’t laugh out loud on more than one occasion (but to be fair, I had been drinking… which is probably the preferred state of mind when watching a movie like this). It was pretty cool and somehow very appropriate to see the boys in India with the man who holds the Guinness World’s Record for the longest fingernails. It was even cooler to see Steve-O drink beer poured over that man’s 50-year-old growths, and then throw it all back up. I mean… that’s entertainment! We also got to glean a little insight from Johnny Knoxville concerning his love of the “old man” character he often plays. It’s the only time he can go out in public without being recognized and pull some pranks like he used to back in the old days.

Long story short, it goes like this: If you like Jackass, you’ll like this movie. You probably just won’t like it quite as much as all the other Jackass stuff that came before it.

The dvd features a Making of Jackass 2.5 feature, which is basically the same movie, but told in a slightly different way. Sort of like the Richard Donner cut of Superman II, the only major difference being that in this film, you get to see the star peeing on the director. There’s also a Making of Jackass: The Game, which shows how the guys did some motion-capture stuff for their upcoming video game, which actually looks pretty fun. A lot of work went into making sure the game captured the essence of the show.