Jackass Number Two (2006)

There's a moment in Jackass Number Two where you catch yourself laughing at something so aggressively stupid that you immediately feel a bit ashamed, and then you laugh again anyway. That's the whole experience right there. This is exactly what it promises to be: more stunts, more impacts, more bodily fluids than any reasonable human being should ever have to witness. And somehow, for the most part, it works.

If you've seen the first film, you know the deal. The crew are back, they're absolutely unhinged, and the chemistry between them is as warm and chaotic as ever. That's the secret ingredient that people who dismiss these films tend to miss. There's genuine affection between these lads. They're not just torturing each other for clicks, they're doing it for laughs, and you can feel the difference. When someone gets absolutely flattened and the rest of the crew loses it, that laughter is contagious. You're not watching strangers suffer. You're watching mates be idiots together, and there's something oddly joyful about it.

On that front, this is actually a step up from the original. It's funnier, it's slightly better put together, and it has a handful of moments that have genuinely lodged themselves in my brain. The production feels a touch more confident, like they knew exactly what they were doing this time around and leaned into it fully.

But here's where my feelings get a bit complicated. The gross-out dial has been cranked so far past eleven that it occasionally stops being funny and starts being something closer to an endurance test. The first film had a kind of gleeful, cheeky stupidity to it. This one adds more puke, more poop, more things going into and coming out of places that genuinely make you question your life choices for watching. There's a fine art to dumb comedy, and the best Jackass material understands that shock and funny aren't always the same thing. When the balance tips too far towards pure shock, you lose me a bit. Not because I'm above it, but because it stops being inventive and starts feeling like they're just trying to out-gross themselves for the sake of it.

The moments of genius are real, though. When this film is on, it's properly on. The stunt ideas that are simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, the bits where someone's reaction is funnier than the stunt itself, the ridiculous commitment everyone brings to something that makes absolutely no sense. That stuff is great. I just wish they'd trusted it a bit more instead of padding things out with shock for shock's sake.

I also had a look at Jackass 2.5, the direct-to-video follow-up that mopped up the leftover footage from this shoot, and it's interesting to see what didn't make the cut here. A lot of it, honestly, is funnier without the pressure to top itself.

Look, I'm not going to sit here and pretend Jackass Number Two is deep, or clever, or anything other than exactly what it is. Sometimes you want to switch your brain off and watch someone get clobbered by something improbable. On those terms, this absolutely delivers. Three stars. A solid laugh with a few too many moments where they're trying so hard to shock you that they forget to be funny. But the core of it, the camaraderie, the committed stupidity, the sheer delight in doing something daft, that's still very much intact.

For what it is, it works. Just maybe eat before you watch it, not during.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2006  | Watched: 2025-08-27

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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More from Jeff Tremaine: Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013) · Jackass: Gumball Rally 3000 Special (2002) · Jackass 3.5 (2011) · Jackass 2.5 (2007)
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