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Jackass
***1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of March 14, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. USA.
87 minutes. Directed by Jeff Tremaine. Based on the television series created
by Spike Jonze, Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine. Featuring Johnny Knoxville,
Bam Margera, Chris Pontius, Steve-O, Dave England, Ryan Dunn, Jason 'Wee
Man' Acuña, Preston Lacy, Ehren McGhehey, Brandon
Dicamillo.
There is a certain type of person who will go
through with pretty much any dare, and pull it off with gall and panache.
You may not understand him, but you take your hat off, agree that he's got
some balls, and buy the guy a drink. "Jackass" is what happens
when people with the genetic predisposition for getting involved in crazy
crap end up finding each other, forming a large group of friends and having
access to video cameras. Access to lots of beer, I guess, too.
The movie is a spin-off of the legendary MTV show
in which Johnny Knoxville and his gang of buddies engage in such activities
as hanging weights from their privates, skating fast across very thin surfaces
and swimming in raw sewage. There's a simple test for whether or not you
are likely to be entertained by this kind of thing: If you haven't heard
of the show by now, chances are you're not gonna like it.
I like it. There is a freedom to watching stunts
that are this crude, this fast-paced and this insane. 'Performance art' is
usually defined by pompous lunatics making cryptic movements in slow motion
at the corners of coffee houses, but "Jackass" deserves the label more. Its
participants are boneheads who race around town causing self-mutilation and
adolescent fits of giggles, but they look like they're in their element,
and they're funny, admit it. I say it's art, and we can sure as hell call
it some kind of performance.
The word "bonehead" is used affectionately. Knoxville
and his crew are too creative to be stupid, although they go through too
much painful action to be declared sane just yet. Here we see Johnny get
shot in the stomach, have a boxing match in a department store with someone
four times his size and tell a car rental guy that he was drunk when he smashed
up his vehicle, but he still ain't paying for it. Steve-O gets paper cuts
in his mouth, finger and toe crevices, then tightropes over a swamp full
of hungry alligators. Other moments include a fat guy and a midget dressing
up as sumo wrestlers and chasing each other through the streets of Japan,
and there's the thing with the toy car that I would not think of spoiling
for you.
There are a lot of practical jokes played on
unsuspecting members of the public, the crudest of which has one of the guys
taking a dump in a display toilet at a plumbing store. But as rude as these
things are, they're not mean-spirited -- there is crudeness in the episodes,
but never do the Jackass crew attempt to humiliate anyone, or set them up
to look stupid. Take the episode where Bam Margera puts a crocodile in his
mom's kitchen to capture her reaction. She screams and wails, but she's not
being ridiculed. Her horror is a natural reaction, and the comedy comes from
the absurdity of the situation. The one time a victim of a prank does something
that could be construed as cowardly, he is interviewed in the next scene
-- laughing and joking and holding his hands up in submission, rather than
being seen purely as the foil of crafty protagonists.
This is as close as material of such a disgusting
pitch can get to sweetness. Compare it to the spinoffs of "Trigger Happy
TV", and all the other reality-television comedy crap that fills up deadzones
like BBC Three. The cast themselves seem tightknit, almost united by purpose.
Perhaps that is the reason so many otherwise sane kids have been imitating
the stunts on "Jackass" -- the behaviour on the show is nuts, but the rapport
of it sometimes can come across as innocent, like boys being boys, making
the most of heedless youth. People see them and think, hey, man, we should
be doing shit like this. (Small consolation for your broken leg, Peter, but
it's not as if we didn't warn you.)
It has been pointed out that "Jackass: The Movie"
is a sketch show with two very short celluloid bookends, and is therefore
not exactly the cinematic evolution of the show. That's true, in a way --
the ads claim that we're seeing things the creators were not allowed to do
on TV, but considering this was the programme that showed us a colonic irrigation
in all its gory detail and a living woman being offered to taxidermists,
it's safe to say that things cannot get much more extreme.
The appeal of "Jackass" in the cinema is celebrating
that the phenomenon has gotten this big, and laughing at the material with
the company of a massive audience. It is perfect for evoking audience reactions
-- whether the men onscreen are performing their tricks, or sizing them up
beforehand with looks of queasy disbelief, we find ourselves instinctively
gasping, groaning and giggling. This is also, quite possibly, the first time
I've seen "Jackass" sober, and it plays as well as ever.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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