Jackass: The Movie (2002)

Jackass: The Movie arrives in 2002 as a feature-length expansion of an MTV television series, and it carries with it no discernible interest in improving anyone. Johnny Knoxville and his associates ride a shopping cart into a fruit stand, snort wasabi, wrestle live alligators, and insert a toy car into a colleague's rectum for the purposes of an x-ray. The camera records. The audience recoils and laughs. The transaction concludes. There is no thesis beneath the mayhem, no argument about how we ought to live, and no gesture toward the great social questions of the age.

Consider the raw material available. The crew travels to Japan, where a member of the cast fights a female kickboxing champion, and the setting functions purely as a backdrop for slapstick. Women appear as prank victims or as the opponent in a staged bout, and the film draws no lesson from any of it. Male nudity is deployed for revulsion and hilarity, never for identity. Bodies are bruised, shocked, and humiliated, and at no point is anyone asked to feel good about his own. Even the material a more conscientious production might have mined for a message, the self-harm, the group dynamics, the willing degradation, is left unexamined. The film wants only to show us a man being launched by catapult into a lake.

The result is a document from a vanished era, or perhaps from no era at all. It lectures no one. It improves no one. It simply exists, a monument to appetite and poor judgment, and there is something almost restful in its total absence of instruction. It opened at number one regardless, which tells us something about the audience and nothing about the film's conscience.