Genre Action

Jackass: The Movie (2002)

Item: Jackass: The Movie
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — Jackass: The Movie (2002)

By the early 2000s, Jackass had already turned television on its head. The MTV show, which ran from 2000 to 2002, built a devoted following around Johnny Knoxville and a rotating cast of willing idiots performing increasingly reckless stunts, pranks, and bodily-fluid-based gags for the camera. It was the kind of programming that parents hated and teenagers adored, and that division was more or less the point. When Paramount Pictures and Dickhouse Productions decided to take the whole enterprise to the big screen in 2002, the question was not really whether it would be good. It was whether the format could survive the transition from your mate's telly to an actual cinema auditorium, with actual ticket prices and the implicit promise that something, anything, had been elevated in the process.

The answer, directed by Jeff Tremaine (who had helmed the original TV series and has since returned to the franchise repeatedly, including in Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa and Jackass: Gumball Rally 3000 Special), is essentially: the same, only louder and with a bigger budget for international travel. At 85 minutes, the film follows Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Ryan Dunn, and the broader crew as they tear through a series of set pieces, some staged in controlled (loosely speaking) environments and some let loose on an unsuspecting public. There is a sequence in Japan involving panda costumes and a department store that has a certain anarchic confidence to it, and live alligators make an appearance that the health-and-safety lobby presumably still discusses in hushed, pained tones. The production is polished but unremarkable on a technical level, shot largely on digital video in a style that prioritises getting the thing in the can before anyone involved changes their mind. It was produced under the Lynch Siderow and Dickhouse banners for Paramount, and its commercial success was significant enough to establish the franchise as a genuine theatrical property rather than a novelty spin-off.

Knoxville himself is the nominal anchor, the grinning frontman who takes more than his fair share of physical punishment and seems, improbably, to enjoy it. He had begun to branch out into more conventional acting work around this period, as anyone who has read my thoughts on The Ringer or The Dukes of Hazzard will know, but here he is very much in his natural habitat: no character, no script, just a very high pain threshold and a camera pointed at him. Steve-O and Margera bring their own distinct energies, and the group dynamic is collegiate in a way that reads less like a professional production and more like a group of mates who happen to have a film crew following them around. Whether that is a strength or a limitation rather depends on what you walked into the cinema expecting.

Let’s not pretend this is cinema. Jackass: The Movie isn’t a film so much as a 90-minute dare gone horribly right, a glorified home video of grown men doing profoundly stupid things to their own bodies, all for the sake of a laugh. It’s gross, immature, badly produced, sloppily edited, and occasionally hard to watch. But it’s also undeniably, stupidly funny. There’s a primal, almost childlike joy in watching Johnny Knoxville get electric shocked, Steve-O snort wasabi, or Dave England shit in a plumbing store. The humour is entirely physical, rooted in pain, humiliation, and the sheer audacity of “what if we just… did that?” It’s not clever, it doesn’t have a message, and it certainly doesn’t care about taste but it commits to its own absurdity with such total sincerity that it becomes hypnotic. You laugh because it’s ridiculous, then you laugh because you can’t believe they actually went through with it. It’s not for everyone and it shouldn’t be. But as a distilled burst of chaotic, no-rules comedy, it works. The pacing drags in places, the skits repeat, and the low-budget DV look hasn’t aged gracefully. But the energy is raw, the camaraderie real, and the commitment to idiocy unmatched. It’s dumb. It’s gross. It’s poorly made. But yeah it’s funny. And sometimes, that’s enough.

I'll admit that going back to this one, I found myself questioning whether I was laughing at it or with it, and I'm still not entirely sure the distinction matters. What does matter is that the laughs, when they come, feel genuine rather than manufactured, which is more than you can say for plenty of films with ten times the budget and a hundred times the pretension. It's the kind of thing you'd never recommend to your mum, and you'd think twice about admitting you enjoyed it to anyone whose opinion you value. But there it is. Sometimes a film doesn't need to be anything more than exactly what it is.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2002 | Watched: 2025-08-19

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Jackass: The Movie (2002) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Paramount Plus · Paramount+ Amazon Channel · Paramount Plus Premium · Paramount Plus Basic with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: fuboTV · Paramount Plus Premium · Paramount Plus Essential · Paramount+ Amazon Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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