Jackass Forever (2022)

Let me be straight with you: the bee attack still got me. There's something so deeply, stupidly funny about watching a grown man get absolutely mauled by a swarm of bees that bypasses every rational part of your brain and hits something ancient and primal. And for a moment, just a moment, I thought Jackass Forever might actually pull it off. It doesn't. But that moment is real, and it's worth acknowledging before I get into why this thing left me feeling a bit hollow.

The old crew are still here, still game, still absolutely battered by decades of self-inflicted punishment. Steve-O, Wee Man, Pontius, Johnny Knoxville doing that face he does, the one where he looks simultaneously terrified and delighted and possibly concussed. Fair play to all of them. These are not young men doing this anymore, and there's a strange kind of respect that kicks in when you watch someone their age take that kind of punishment with a grin. The spirit is willing, even if the body has clearly filed several formal complaints.

But here's the thing that kept nagging at me all the way through: Bam Margera isn't in it, and his absence doesn't just leave a gap, it leaves a crater. Bam wasn't simply a cast member doing stunts. He was chaos in human form. Unpredictable, genuinely unhinged, the kind of person who made you feel like anything could happen at any moment. That feeling, that edge of real danger and genuine anarchy, is what made the early Jackass stuff so electric. Without him, the whole enterprise feels safer than it should. Polished. Calculated, even.

And the new faces brought in to freshen things up? Look, they're fine. They're clearly athletic and willing and they do the things asked of them. But that's exactly the problem. They feel like performers. Hired talent. The original crew felt like a group of genuinely unhinged mates who happened to point a camera at themselves in a backyard, and that distinction matters more than any individual stunt. You can recreate the format, you can even recreate some of the laughs, but you can't manufacture that sense of chaotic friendship. It has to be real.

The production values are slick, and I mean that as a criticism. There's a reason the old stuff felt dangerous: it looked dangerous. Shaky cameras, bad lighting, the kind of footage that felt like it had been passed around on a VHS tape between school mates. Jackass Forever looks like it cost a lot of money, and it shows in the worst possible way. The stunts are bigger, the cameras are better, and somehow the whole thing feels smaller for it. Soul doesn't scale up with the budget.

I've spent a fair amount of time in this corner of the Jackass universe, having reviewed things like Jackass 2.5 (2007) and Jackass: Gumball Rally 3000 Special (2002), so I'm not coming at this as someone who's allergic to stupid. I love stupid done right. This just isn't quite that. It's stupid done expensively, which is a very different thing.

There are laughs here. I won't pretend otherwise. A few moments made me genuinely gasp and then immediately laugh at myself for gasping. If you're after a couple of hours of gross-out gags and mild nostalgia, you'll find enough to keep you going. But if you're going in hoping to feel that original spark, that raw, slightly dangerous energy that made the early films feel like something genuinely new, you'll come away a bit disappointed.

Two stars. Watchable, occasionally funny, but mostly a reminder that some lightning doesn't go back in the bottle. No Bam, no real danger, no soul. Come back when you've found all three.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2022  | Watched: 2025-09-07

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