Jackass: Best And Last Review - A Shameless Cash Grab Finale From The Slapstick Kings

The streaming age has all but killed the concept of a greatest hits album; now, if you want to listen to the best-known tracks in any artist's back catalog, Spotify already has a custom-built playlist just for you. You'd assume the same rule would apply to other mediums too, as you can watch endless fan made supercuts of your favorite franchises on YouTube and TikTok, but Hollywood is ignoring that memo and is now testing the waters to see whether fans will turn out in droves for cinematic compilations of archive material they can squeeze out on the cheap. If "Jackass: Best and Last" were presented as a belated 25th anniversary celebration of the grossest, dumbest stunts they've ever pulled off, it would feel a lot less cynical than what has arrived, where even the funniest, most conceptually daring new set pieces have transparently been thrown together on the Paramount lot.

Announced in January and quickly filmed between late February and early March, this fifth and final Jackass outing comes off as an awkward farewell, after 2022's brilliant "Jackass Forever" felt like a logical conclusion. That movie aimed to pass the baton to a new generation of amateur stunt artists and had the cast reflect on the idea of growing old disgracefully, looking back at a near quarter-century of self-inflicted stupidity. This movie feels transparently studio mandated in comparison, seemingly only existing because Paramount's CEO decided at the very end of 2025 that he wanted to release 15 movies theatrically in 2026 and didn't have anywhere near enough projects in the works to make that goal a reality. Even as it allows the audience to relive some of their most notorious moments, it still feels like the belated whimper after going out with a bang last time.

What "Jackass: Best and Last" does have in its favor is that it's the only major studio wide release this year likely to trigger consistent belly laughs, although the archive footage bears most of the heavy lifting there. The gross-out gags and the over-the-top slapstick violence are what people remember from the franchise, but the back catalog sequences offer a reminder that these guys have natural comic instincts even when they're not relying on elaborate forms of punishment.

An incidental scene from the first "Jackass" movie, where they irritate golfers about to make big swings by playing loud air horns, is deployed early and sums up the admirably reckless spirit of the series better than anything else here. The crew has never been mean-spirited — including to each other as they put themselves through the ringer, as improbable as that might sound — and even their jostles with the general public are designed to put themselves in the line of fire for our entertainment. The end credits offer special thanks to both Buster Keaton and Tom & Jerry, and the series has proved enduring because it's always remained true to that simple slapstick ingenuity, with a healthy dose of John Waters' homoerotic gross-out thrown in for good measure.

Many of the archive set pieces still get a good laugh, and for a more casual fan like me, there was a joy in seeing some of their earliest Jackass prototypes dating back to the 1990s, which have never been allowed to be broadcast. The movie opens with Johnny Knoxville shooting himself in the chest (don't worry, there were nude mags to blunt the impact) and later features him being put inside a cardboard box and pushed down the stairs, which MTV never aired out of fears it was too easy to imitate. A quick look online after the screening and I found both clips already on YouTube, where they've sat for years, with the former clip every bit as nail-biting at home on a laptop as it was with a packed crowd. 

Then there's an unaired scene from the pilot where Knoxville tried to get arrested in downtown LA wearing a prison uniform, an infamous bit which, quite honestly, you can understand why it was left on the cutting room floor; there's no real comedic payoff. It's good that these scenes have been given something of an official release after living in limbo, but they'll hardly entice die-hards that this is worth their time.

As for the new stunts, only two feel like vintage Jackass: Steve-O receiving a rectal exam from a robot, and a game of Twister that takes place after the crew takes rapidly acting laxatives. In the case of the latter, it's impressive that even within a movie green lit as a quick cash grab, they haven't lost the power to disgust. Unfortunately, the elaborate nature of both only underlines the uncharacteristic lack of thought and effort that's gone into other new set pieces, all of which appear to be shot on the Paramount lot, and mostly thrown together on the fly, with lip injections, Chris Pontius doing a naked pole vault, and an escape room full of quick concepts they seemingly had no interest in fleshing out beyond the bare minimum. The gang may be getting too old for the more life-endangering stunts, but doesn't that validate them making a more straightforward greatest hits, picking their favorite bits instead of showing them at random in-between new footage, instead?

Jeff Tremaine, the director of all five Jackass movies, never allows this goodbye to get too maudlin, and it's in the spirit of the franchise that the dearly departed Ryan Dunn is memorialized through the vintage set piece of a toy car being shoved up his butt (one of the funniest archive moments here). But realistically, there's already a ceiling on how emotional a farewell this can be when this was ground extensively covered the last time around; the only difference is there are more classic moments to make it feel like a franchise capping celebration. And as the film progresses, many of those feel selected at random — who would argue that their staged kidnapping of Brad Pitt was among their very finest scenes?

"Jackass: Best and Last" is the weakest in the franchise ("Bad Grandpa," you are no longer the worst), and only as funny as it is because it relies heavily on classic slapstick set pieces that haven't grown old. It's a shameless cash grab, but more shameless cash grabs should offer the amount of laughs this one does.