The Jackass Movies, Ranked

When Mel Brooks feature filmmaking debut "The Producers" hit theaters in 1968, it was both a critical/commercial smash and a bit of a scandal. Emboldened in part by the increasing permissiveness of the counterculture comedy era, Brooks pushed the outside of the envelope with a ribald sense of humor he couldn't indulge as a writer for NBC's "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour" and outright shredded it by making light of the Third Reich with the film's fictional musical "Springtime for Hitler." Soon after the film's release, he was confronted in an elevator by a woman who told him "The Producers" was vulgar. Brooks fired back, "Lady, it rose below vulgarity."

This, I believe, is true of "Jackass." Created by Jeff Tremaine, Spike Jonze and Johnny Knoxville, this showcase for a gang of lovable skateboard-culture knuckleheads who subject themselves and each other to a series of physically/mentally scarring stunts and pranks has been rising below vulgarity for 24 years. Unlike Brooks, however, Knoxville and the core Jackass crew were not critical darlings. But while the MTV series was easily brushed off as one of the channel's youth-skewing inanities, the artistic value of "Jackass" had to be assessed by the nation's cultural gatekeepers when it became a blockbuster 2002 movie.

Some admitted to enjoying the movie, but initially, the overwhelming sentiment was driven by killjoys who declared the undertaking "a leading example of the decline of Western Civilization."

Like many of my Gen X cohort, I was a fan from day one. I grew up with guys like Knoxville and never grew out of appreciating a good gross-out gag. The key to the crew's success was its camaraderie and imagination. Theirs was a loving, invigoratingly inventive torture. So let's raise a glass to the Jackasses, and rank their feature films in order of rank, viscerally satisfying stupidity.

There are no bad "Jackass" movies (because I refuse to consider "Action Park" a "Jackass movie), but this foregrounding of Knoxvilles's elderly Irving Zisman character hits more lulls than the others due to its attempt to intersperse its real-life shenanigans across a fictional three-act narrative. (Eric André's 2021 feature "Bad Trip," also produced by Tremaine, does this far more effectively.)

Fortunately, Tremaine, Jonze and Knoxville (all three of whom collaborated on the screenplay) aren't trying to make "Of Mice and Men" here. After the hugely profitable success of the first three "Jackass" movies, they know not to keep their fans waiting too long for the addled Zisman to crash a wedding (in every calamitous sense) or get his droopy male member lodged somewhere improbable and wholly inconvenient. 

If this is the least rewatchable installment of the franchise, it's only because the focus on Zisman runs counter to the scatterbrained madness of the team's method. Variety is the wasabi-snorting spice of the "Jackass" universe, and Zisman is simply more effective in small doses (like going on a shoplifting spree in a Hollywood Boulevard gift shop and defending his thievery by revealing to the owner that he was Lon Chaney's lover).

If "Jackass Forever" really is the original gang's final go-round, they can hold their heads high and say they went out with a bittersweet bang. You don't expect to get weepy while watching people get nut punched and drenched with bodily fluids (that is if you're not crying from laughing), but the absence of Bam Margera and, especially, Ryan Dunn forces us to contend with the occasional impermanence of friendship and the inescapable debt we owe to the Grim Reaper. We lost Dunn, one of the troupe's most likable goofballs, to a fatal car accident in 2011, and it's obvious that his death contributed to Margera's (currently ongoing) spiral. Factor in Knoxville's gray hair and the rest of the Jackasses looking very much their age (aside from that shaggy ladykiller Chris Pontius), and every lump lands with a heightened wince-inducing impact.

The boys brought in a new batch of daredevils — including *gasp* a female — to liven things up and absorb some of the punishment they simply can't take at the same volume anymore. But that didn't stop Knoxville from once again getting clobbered by a bull (this encounter landed him in the hospital with a slew of broken bones and a brain hemorrhage) or "Danger" Ehren McGhehey rupturing a testicle during one of the "Cup Tests." The chaotic carousel finale is the least memorable of the film series' concluding stunts, but we can cut these old fellas a bit of slack, because it feels like they've done it all.

Before you come at me with a cattle prod, let me assure you that the top three films are almost in a virtual tie for first place. Almost. I'm placing "Jackass Number Two" at number three because it lacked the shocking escalation of the first movie. Rarely has a film exceeded my expectations as thoroughly as "Jackass: The Movie," whereas its follow-up is, in terms of scale and stomach-turning genius, more of the riotous same.

This is, however, the only official, non-narrative "Jackass" installment that introduces a bit of character development. Who knew that Bam, the collective's brattiest member (particularly in light of his unapologetic and unremitting torture of his parents), had an incapacitating fear of snakes? Once his buddies catch wind of this phobia, they exploit it in classic, several-miles-over-the-top Jackass fashion by surreptitiously dumping him in a pit full of slithering, hissing serpents. And Bam only elates his co-stars more by crying.

I'd say this would be the closest a Jackass stunt has ever come to outright cruelty, but a) it's Bam, and b) the long-con bit in which McGhehey poses as a terrorist to spook a cab driver only to have the tables ruthlessly turned on him (the driver is Broken Lizard's Jay Chandrasekhar) is downright evil. When McGhehey realizes his fake beard was made out of shaved pubic hair, we just assume he did something at some juncture in his life to deserve this.

(I will say that, of the ".5" releases that are essentially feature-length collections of cut scenes, "Jackass 2.5" is the best of the bunch.)

The late-2000s/early-2010s 3D craze — shamelessly engineered by studios and exhibitors desperate to justify massive ticket price hikes — mercifully died out a decade or so ago, but there were a handful of movies that justified the extra coin, and "Jackass 3D" was the best of them. James Cameron's Pandora was beautifully rendered, but the apple of my eye is liquid excrement hurtling at a 3D camera from a crap-filled port-a-potty that's been flung into the air. Steve-O is, of course, the occupant of this fetid vessel, and it's a high compliment indeed to say this is one of the fearless adventurer's most memorable stunts (though he outdoes himself repeatedly in his stand-up/stunt melange "Steve-O's Bucket List").

The addition of the then new Phantom high speed camera gives the gang the chance to pull off some wild high speed shenanigans (the highlight being the explosive grand finale), but my favorite bits are the inspired throwaways like setting up a roller skating rink in the back of a moving truck (which, yes, moves while the boys futilely attempt to skate), a painful game of beehive tetherball and Ryan Dunn recreating the classic, "Ride of the Valkyries"-scored Maxell tape commercial by sitting on a black leather couch and getting blown ass-over-teakettle by a fired-up jet engine. In terms of sheer, random creativity, that last gag is a minor masterpiece of foolishness.

Over two decades ago, Paramount Pictures was just hoping to make a quick, mildly profitable off the theatrical release of "Jackass: The Movie." The home entertainment window was where they expected to make a killing. So when this ultra-cheap $5 million production opened to $23 million at the North American box office, the studio that gave us "The Godfather" suddenly realized that a movie in which Dave England strolls into a hardware store and takes a crap in a display toilet was, inexplicably, a license to print money.

My first screening of "Jackass: The Movie" with a paying audience was the comedy equivalent of going to a Beatles concert in 1964. You could barely hear the movie over the roaring laughter, which rarely let up. The film is riddled with vintage Jackass bits: Knoxville getting knocked out by Butterbean in a cramped clothing store ("Is Butterbean okay?"), Bam sneaking into his parents' bedroom and setting off a trash can full of fireworks in the middle of the night, Dunn wedging a toy car up his anus so he can surprise an unwitting doctor with a shocking x-ray... what can you say? This is "Jackass" rising below vulgarity again and again for 85 unforgettable minutes.