Film review – Jackass 3D

My review of Jackass 3D.

From Venue magazine.

Basically, Jackass 3D is A Serbian Film or The Human Centipede – only after every anal atrocity, sufferers have to grin through their pain and take it all in good sport.  If you’re going to like it, no low star rating will put you off … and if your aren’t, only direct orders from Robin Askew and an enormous Venue freelance film review fee would persuade you to sit through the thing.

Spun off from the popular MTV show in which tattooed frat boy types perform dangerous and humiliating stunts, this is the third entry in the big-screen incarnation of the franchise and goes to show that the repetoire of things which make us puke is fairly small.  To whit, items going into or coming out of guys’ bottoms, squirting pee-pee, much man-on-man contact (a suitable subject for your thesis might be the weird mix of homophobia and homoeroticism in frat slob humour), dwarf-tossing, objects shot directly into the ‘nads, aggressive encounters with angry animals (bees, snakes, a ram, buffalo, a prat in a gorilla suit), operating a trumpet or a blowdart gun with farts, fat people in their underwear, ill-advised misuse of jetskis and a jet engine and slo-mo punches in the face.  It’s impossible not to laugh for a few minutes at the low level of assholery, but it’s equally hard to sustain interest, so the supposed major set-piece (which involves self-destructive Steve-O, a portaloo, a lot of dog-shit and a bungee-cord) which forms a climax feels ho-hum.

To add variety, the film stages Candid Camera-type stunts in which regular citizens are discomfited by a dwarf bar-fight or an old codger (charismatic host Johnny Knoxville in make-up) inappropriately smooching his underage-looking granddaughter in public.  It doesn’t have the patience to let these build into anything like humour, and we keep cutting back to guys taking their licks so enthusiastically that even the director is compelled to throw up.  The 3D is patchy, probably because the technical demands of the format don’t gibe with the cam-corder Jackass aesthetic, but there are a couple of more controlled, studio-set sequences which employ quite remarkable dimensional and slow-motion effects, including a bit with an entire set exploding around the gang which draws inspiration from the surreal finale of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and the elevator dream sequence from The Shining – suggesting that someone connected with this watched a proper film before brain damage set in.