Jackass 2.5 (2007)

Jackass 2.5 arrived in December of 2007 as a contractual obligation dressed in a documentary's clothing. It gathers the stunts that did not survive the edit of the previous theatrical release and strings them together with the enthusiasm of a man emptying a garage. Wee Man fires a urine-powered gun at his colleagues. A miniature motorbike tears through a grocery aisle. A heavyset performer wears a King Kong suit. There is a sperm sample. There are three segments from India, in which the crew treat an entire subcontinent as a prop cupboard. The result runs barely an hour and was released, tellingly, straight to DVD.

An audit of the film's progressive sensibilities returns a clean sheet. The cast remains the same cohort of white male stunt performers who built the franchise on MTV, and Wee Man is present as a founding member, not as an act of casting conscience. Female participants are marginal. The India footage plays culture clash for slapstick, with no interest in race as a subject. Bodies that deviate from the norm appear, and are mocked, which places the film at the far pole from any affirmation of them. There is no environmental content. The vehicles, the fireworks and the general indifference to consequence are all gasoline-powered. The enterprise is an MTV commercial product and behaves like one.

The distinguishing feature, the thing that separates this from nearly every other film released in its decade, is its total absence of instruction. Nothing is proposed, nothing is corrected, no viewer is scolded. A man in a King Kong suit falls over, and the film asks nothing further of us. In an era that would soon learn to append a moral to every gag, this remains a purely transactional arrangement: ninety minutes of pain, disgust and stupidity, delivered without a thesis. We are not improved. We are not asked to be.