Jackass 3D (2010)

The third entry in the Jackass cycle presents itself as a laboratory report filed from a locker room floor. Johnny Knoxville and his associates, men of advancing age and receding cartilage, offer themselves to charging bulls, beehives, a port-a-potty on bungee cords, and a Lamborghini repurposed as dental equipment. The 3D is deployed with the subtlety of a thrown brick. Nothing here gestures toward the cultural preoccupations of the current decade, and the omission registers as a small mercy. No lesson is delivered. A man is simply rammed by a sheep while playing a trumpet.

The company remains the same fraternity of white men who populated the previous two installments, supplemented by relatives, professional athletes, and a handful of little people recruited for a bar brawl. Women drift through as bystanders or as targets of domestic pranks, and the film declines to editorialize about any of it. Male nudity abounds, along with a steady current of horseplay between men, none of it framed as identity or advocacy. Flesh exists here to be bruised, glued, kicked, and occasionally launched skyward. There is no environmental conscience, no economic grievance, no therapeutic vocabulary, no revised account of anything. The body is not celebrated. The body is a prop.

We file this as a sequel, a work of non-fiction featuring its actual participants, and a box office champion of its release window. It is, in the end, a documentary about male friendship conducted at the volume of a demolition derby. The apparatus of social instruction that governs so much contemporary cinema has taken the day off. There is nothing to decode and no position to adopt. Only the sound of a grown man being struck in the face with a football, rendered in slow motion, and the quiet sense that this is sufficient.