About 20 minutes into Jackass Forever, you’ll have laughed, winced, crossed your legs and muttered a weary ‘For fuck’s sake…’ more times than you would care to recount. There has been pain, and there have been penises, often one and the same. Then a man shits himself. And this is just the pace car leaving skidmarks – there’s still an hour to go.
From here, the mayhem only increases. Sometimes it is grandiose, taking full advantage of quite how much bigger a film production allows an idea to become. At others, it is literally just watching someone being caught off guard and punched in the nuts. There is vomit and there is bruising and there is the most Jackass game of bat and ball you will ever see. All of it is physical comedy genius.
Going into making their fourth movie after a decade away, and over two decades since the show first aired, no small comment has been given to the increasing age of Jackass’ performers. At 50, Johnny Knoxville is of an age where saying no to being gored by a bull is no slight on his bravery. But this just makes it funnier when he, Steve-O and the other long-in-the-missing-tooth classic protagonists bring it up. And there are new, younger, equally stupid additions to the gang here as well, although none of them take the battering as their elders. There’s also celebrity turns from Machine Gun Kelly (trying to out-pedal Steve-O on an exercise bike in order to deliver one’s opponent a slap from a giant hand attached to it), and Tyler, The Creator (a man right to be suspicious of what director Jeff Tremaine has put under the piano stool he’s sat on).