Genre Action

Haggard (2003)

Item: Haggard
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Haggard (2003)

There is a particular breed of early-2000s media that sits somewhere between a proper film and a long skate video someone thought deserved a wider audience. Haggard (2003) lands firmly in that territory. The premise is loose enough to scribble on a napkin: a young man becomes convinced his ex-girlfriend, Glauren, has been carrying on behind his back with a character known as Hellboy, and so he and his mates set about uncovering the truth. What follows across 96 minutes is less a conventional narrative and more a series of pranks, confrontations, and physical comedy loosely threaded onto that premise. The film was produced under Adio Entertainment and shot with a budget that, by any reasonable measure, was minimal, which is either a limitation or a feature depending on your relationship with the CKY universe.

The director here is Bam Margera, who by 2003 had already built a devoted following through his earlier video work. If you have spent any time with Landspeed presents: CKY, CKY2K, CKY 3, or CKY 4: The Latest & Greatest, all of which Margera also directed, you will arrive at Haggard with a fairly clear sense of what the aesthetic involves: handheld cameras, a core group of friends who seem constitutionally incapable of behaving sensibly, and a kind of joyful disregard for anything resembling production polish. Moving from short-form videos to a feature-length project was a logical next step for Margera, even if the filmmaking approach remained largely the same.

The principal cast is drawn almost entirely from that same inner circle. Ryan Dunn, familiar to many from the Jackass world, takes the lead role, bringing the kind of good-natured, self-deprecating physicality that made him a natural on camera. Margera himself appears alongside him, as does Rake Yohn and Ann Marie Esposito, while Jennifer Rivell plays the ex-girlfriend at the centre of the drama. These are not trained actors working from polished scripts, and the film does not pretend otherwise. The whole enterprise has the energy of a group of mates who genuinely like each other and happen to have a camera running, which is either the film's greatest strength or the thing that will put you off within the first ten minutes, depending entirely on your tolerance for that sort of thing.

Bam Margera’s Haggard is a glorified home video shot on a camcorder, held together by duct tape and the sheer force of early-2000s skate-punk energy. The plot (Ryan Dunn gets cheated on, enlists his friends to help him get revenge on his girlfriend and her new lover) is barely there, more of an excuse for stunts, pranks, drunken rants, and slapstick chaos. But if you were a kid in the late 90s or early 2000s, none of that matters. You already know what you’re getting: pure, unfiltered CKY-era rebellion, and Bam as the chaotic king of it all. This was peak Bam. Back when he was the coolest guy on MTV, skating off roofs, blowing up Porta-Potties, and living by his own ridiculous code. Haggard captures that raw, anarchic spirit. It’s low budget, sure, the sound is muddy, the editing is janky, and half the scenes look like they were filmed in someone’s basement but it’s also weirdly charming. The camaraderie between Bam, Ryan Dunn, Brandon DiCamillo, and the rest of the crew feels real, unscripted, and full of the kind of dumb loyalty only teenage boys understand. It’s silly. It’s crude. But it’s also fun the kind of dumb, reckless, “what even was that?” fun that doesn’t exist in mainstream comedy anymore. It’s a time capsule of a very specific moment: flip phones, baggy jeans, punk playlists, and the belief that doing something stupid on camera was the highest art form. Haggard isn’t good in the traditional sense. But as a piece of nostalgia, a snapshot of a subculture, and a monument to pre-fame Bam Margera. It’s got heart.

For me, that sense of time and place is what lingers most. There is something almost anthropological about watching it now, a document of a very specific youth subculture that existed before social media smoothed everything out and made rebellion look the same everywhere. It is scrappy in ways that no studio product would allow itself to be, and that scrappiness is, oddly, the point. Films like this do not get made in quite the same spirit anymore, and I find myself more fond of it for that reason than I perhaps expected to be. Sometimes the most honest thing a film can do is exactly what it says on the tin.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2003 | Watched: 2025-08-11

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Trailer

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