Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013)

There is a scene in which a prosthetic scrotum is lowered into a vending machine, and the machine wins. This is offered without judgment, because the film offers nothing with judgment. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is a hidden-camera comedy in which Johnny Knoxville, buried under three and a half hours of latex each morning, impersonates an eighty-six-year-old man and drives a stolen corpse across the American South while his eight-year-old grandson watches. The loose narrative, borrowed from Borat and stripped of that film's satirical apparatus, exists only to string pranks together. Real people are the punchline. They are not in on it. The film knows this and does not care, which is at least a position.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is remarkably clean, and not in the way a studio might hope. The cast is white to a degree that suggests a casting call held in a very specific suburb. The one notable detour into a Black strip club is played for shock and nothing else. Women appear as targets of leering, as pageant contestants to be ogled, as obstacles to Irving's unconvincing flirtation. The comedy is built on the body as a source of disgust: the sagging flesh, the exposed genitals, the defecation on a diner wall. This is the precise inverse of any movement that asks us to regard bodies with kindness. There is no environmental concern, no economic critique, no historical argument to revise, and no message whatsoever. The film is, in the strictest sense, innocent of ideology. It is also innocent of almost everything else.

What remains is craft, and there is some. The makeup earned an Academy Award nomination, which the film lost to Dallas Buyers Club, and the nomination was deserved. Knoxville commits fully. Jackson Nicoll, as the boy, is genuinely unnerving in a way that suggests a child who has not yet learned to be a person. The whole enterprise opened at number one and took in a hundred and fifty million dollars worldwide, which tells us something about ourselves that no lecture ever could. We watched. We laughed. We went home. The classification is straightforward: a zero across every category that matters, and a strange, grudging respect for the honesty of that.