Entertainment
Review: They’re finally too old for it in the middling clip reel ‘Jackass: Best and Last’
The best weapon in the “Jackass’” arsenal isn’t the taser, the beehive or the booby-trapped latrine. It’s the explosion of relief when a prank ends, often in humiliation, always with hoots and claps. The first film, 2002’s “Jackass: The Movie” was slow to discover that carnage without camaraderie is painful; several injuries limped off-screen in horrified silence. Laughter heals, except for the brain hemorrhage that Johnny Knoxville suffered in 2022’s “Jackass Forever” when, dissatisfied by the clobbering he took from a bull, requested a second ramming that knocked him out cold.
Hence “Jackass: Best and Last,” the goon squad’s alleged final film, is underwhelmingly tame. Shot quickly by stalwart director Jeff Tremaine this spring, half of it is a clip reel of past hits, like the time fan favorite Steve-O slingshotted into the sky in a port-a-potty. The rest is scraps of hastily assembled chaos, the most elaborate of which is a puppet show in which veterans Ehren McGhehey, Dave England and Jason “Wee Man” Acuña dangle helplessly from strings, trying to recite cue cards while being pummeled by tropical fruit. “A pineapple!” Wee Man moans.
I’m no sadist. They’ve suffered plenty for our amusement. Still, it’s a shame that for the first time in two and a half decades of cringe comedy, the guffaws feel forced.
Acknowledging the Jackasses’ age, if not maturity, are a couple skits about prostate and rectal checkups. (The gnarliest involves clear pants, colonoscopy prep liquid and a game of Twister.) Modern technology enters the arena with a nimble-fingered robot. If the team had invested any actual energy into brainstorming this entry, they’d have played paintball with a sniper drone. At least for the sake of torch-passing, someone should have thought of something for the newish members introduced in “Jackass Forever” to do besides stand around and applaud.
These fresher faces — Jasper Dolphin, Rachel Wolfson, Zach Holmes — prove brave and resilient when allowed to participate. Only one of them, Sean “Poopies” McInerney, a surf bro so gullible that I’m not sure he’s capable of informed legal consent, fits into “Best and Last” like a well-worn punching bag. (When Poopies yelps that “my mind is getting to me” while wearing a shock collar around a sensitive area, people snort because, as sweet as he seems, the only thing rattling inside his cranium is a moth.) Early on, Poopies gets swollen lip injections that, someone claims, will last the whole movie. You expect his trophy wife pout to be a running sight gag. But his disfigurement never even gets another closeup.
“Jackass” started with a bang. In January of 1998, Knoxville, then a 26-year-old aspiring actor, strapped on a cheap bulletproof vest padded with a stack of “Hustler” magazines and fired a gun point-blank into his chest. His dumb derring-do went viral on VHS tapes, earning him an MTV show and five feature films. Watching that Rosetta Stone-cold stupid footage here, you’re struck not only by his audacity, but by the scene’s excruciating comic pacing. As there’s only one bullet in the pistol, empty chambers click multiple times before the bullet finally fires. Logically, you know Knoxville will live long enough for his hair to turn fright-wig white. Yet the lizard brain making you gawk is shrieking.
Do not attempt any of the stunts you’re about to see, the prefatory caution blares. Absolutely. The thing is, no one else could. “Best and Last’s” flashbacks are a walloping reminder that Knoxville is inimitable: a telegenic and extroverted entertainer with a charisma he wields like a skunk aims its stink. Upset him at your own risk. Like Buster Keaton before him, Knoxville has an uncanny awareness of how his death-defying escapades appear on camera. Even in that near-suicidal early segment, note how Knoxville stays on his feet, enduring agony with a magician’s “Ta-da!” He might have given himself a bruise the size of a baseball but he’s focused on the audience’s delight.
Over the years, the visuals dramatically improve, from snuff film aesthetics to confidently silly splendor. “Jackass Number Two,” released in 2006, expended major energy on a musical homage to Old Hollywood that nodded to Keaton and bathing beauty Esther Williams who, in MGM’s “Million Dollar Mermaid,” plunged 50 feet into a pool and broke her neck. By 2010’s “Jackass 3D,” which riffed on classic cartoons with Knoxville strapping himself onto an Acme-style red rocket, one could admit they went to see a Jackass movie for the cinematography with even more sincerity than if Knoxville claimed he bought “Hustler” for its life-saving properties.
The new movie doesn’t have any artistic ambition. The charitable excuse for its reliance on old material is that the gang wanted one more film that summed up their entire legacy — from the impact of seeing them age to the opportunity to include departed colleagues Ryan Dunn, who died in 2011, and Bam Margera, fired in 2020. The other explanation is it’s a cash grab made for pennies. Still, Steve-O strives for memorable moments, gathering the gang in a generic office building corridor to watch him take off his pants and pop out a ping-pong ball. There’s a lot of nudity but the setting feels half-assed.
“Best and Last’s” intro splat-tacular, typically a highlight of each film, hinges on the posse standing still on a moving floor. But the monochrome staging — white walls, white ground — looks almost like CGI, the antithesis of their appeal, and it takes us a minute to understand what’s actually going on. Worst, it lacks both suspense and surprise, that no-they-aren’t–oh-god-they-are drama that once elevated the franchise to the peak of pure cinema.
There is — and I mean this — existentialism in witnessing a person embrace shame and terror. Actors have won Oscars without achieving the transcendence of, say, misery glutton McGhehey in “Jackass Forever,” bound to a chair and coated in salmon and honey, realizing that his friends have released a bear into the room. Meryl Streep could never do that (and wouldn’t have to). McGhehey’s sole path to stardom is that he did.
Not everything in a “Jackass” movie needs to be that sublime. One of my few genuine howls in “Best and Last” came in a three-second rehash of someone stepping on a rake; another was the percussion Chris Pontius makes with his swinging nethers before attempting a naked Fosbury flop. There’s a great accidental gag in a cut bit from the original MTV pilot when a deputy pulls up to arrest Knoxville and forgets to put her car in park. Yet the snippet I keep thinking about is a throwaway beat in a new skit when McGhehey willingly gets into the wrong chair again and, once freed, attacks Knoxville who coolly knees him in the nuts. Everyone chuckles.
Once, in anthropology class, my professor lectured on an insular island tribe that cackled whenever someone got hurt. Schadenfreude was the community’s way to vent tension. I thought of that village throughout “Best and Last,” especially during Knoxville’s nonchalant disarmament of his pal. Team Jackass has stayed united even while at each other’s throats. In bad times, they’ve borne each other’s struggles with sobriety and mental health. In good, they’ve seen the inequality of success that’s left Knoxville in a better financial position to retire than the rest.
While “Best and Last” is a whiff, I can forgive this band of bozos’ urge to make it. No one seems happy to still be zapping themselves with electrodes. They just want to rally together for the final time to choke out one last laugh.
‘Jackass: Best and Last’
Rated: R, for extremely dangerous stunts and crude material throughout, graphic nudity, pervasive language and sexual material
Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes
Playing: Opening Friday, June 26 in wide release
Paul Wright has created a moodscape of loneliness in this seriously intended, strenuously performed movie, a followup to his 2013 debut feature For Those in Peril. As before, Wright is working with lead actor George MacKay, who here plays Dylan, a troubled restaurant worker embarking on inner and outer journeys of wretchedness, desperate to make sense of a passionately remembered past and heading for the cliff-edge. As before, I think Wright has intelligently absorbed the influence of Terrence Malick in the emphasis on non-narrative ideas of mood and moment, foregrounding fleeting images and perceptions. Wright often intersperses the action with a barrage of millisecond-clips from TV and online, migraine rushes of sensory overload showing us how the world is just somehow too much.
To be honest, Mission is flawed. Some of the action is a bit drama-school-improv; the film’s ambient poetic realism can be shapeless; and in screenwriting terms, suddenly and miraculously finding a pistol out of the blue is borderline preposterous – although on this point Wright does find a way of (almost) subverting Chekhov’s rule about what happens to a gun produced in act one. But Mission is a serious film about a serious, relevant subject: the mental health of young men.
Dylan, played by MacKay, is an intense, lonely, vulnerable guy who has found a job working in an upscale hotel restaurant. He’s doing his best, nursing a crush on co-worker Becky (Emma Naomi), but simmering like a pressure cooker with unexpressed pain. He is tormented with memories of a childhood in which he thinks he was happy for the only time in his life, hanging out with his sister Claire (played as an adult by Rosy McEwen). When he was seven years old, he says, he died for four minutes, and realised what existence was all about.
But did that really happen? Or has Dylan just imagined or misremembered it? It’s not explicitly shown in any of the analogue home-video flashbacks of his childhood with Claire. And the fact/fiction borderline is where many of Dylan’s many violent confrontations with strangers appear to take place: shoving a cop, or threatening a guy at a party with knives, things don’t seem to have any consequences. But if they are only happening in his head, then that is where the consequences are accumulating.
Dylan’s crisis moment – and the film’s best moment – arrives when the hotel’s smarmy, creepy CEO James (Emun Elliott) calls in the staff one by one for a performance-assessment interview and Dylan, though clearly uncomfortable, tries his hardest to go along with this workplace pantomime and tell the boss what he thinks he wants to hear. Dylan is however honest and the calamity of this interview actually made me (bleakly) laugh out loud. But the awful truth is that it was the wrong move; MacKay’s performance shows us how Dylan’s inability to go along with the interview is symptomatic of his estrangement from the world. This revelation starts him off on the violent road to nowhere.
In anguish, he tries to reconnect with Claire (McEwen) who is deeply concerned, but also scared and bewildered by his pointless, self-harming fetishisation of the past. She herself has grown up. She has made accommodations with what needs to be done to get along in life. Why can’t Dylan? It’s a mystery. Dylan feels the burden of manhood and the combination of sensitivity and success that is expected of young men. At one point, he yells: “I want a world where the dreamers and the freaks and the good guys win!” Fair point. But Dylan is shouting this at someone whose house he has broken into, while wearing scary goth makeup. His putative victim is entitled to think that Dylan is not one of the good guys. The irony is semi-intentional.
If Dylan is on a mission, it is perhaps not simply to recapture the past, but to force Claire to recapture it alongside him, to confirm that he is right, to provide some company in his loneliness. The film’s interestingly ambiguous and hallucinatory embrace between the siblings leaves unanswered the question of how much his mission can ever succeed.
On Friday night at the SoFi Stadium, there was nothing random about the songs that played just before Karol G took the stage for the first of three evenings at the venue. We can safely assume that the Colombian superstar selected the cuts herself — the perfect tropicoqueta mix to set up the mood.
First, a shadowy “Bésame Mucho”; Elvis Crespo’s merengue smash “Suavemente”; the Afro-Cuban nugget “El Manisero”; and two life-affirming hits by the Queen of Salsa herself, Celia Cruz: “La Vida Es Un Carnaval” and “La Negra Tiene Tumbao.”
These carefully curated gems share a common element: They managed to transcend the stylistic contours of their respective genres and become something bigger — the kind of irresistible, it-takes-a-village anthems that will lure everyone to the dance floor, even if they don’t understand the lyrics.
And that is exactly what Karol G — la bichota, the South American Cleopatra, the woman with the billion-dollar smile — has been doing for global pop since the release of “Tusa,” her imperial duet with Nicki Minaj, back in 2019.
(Jill Connelly / For De Los)
Karol is currently the 42nd-most-streamed artist on Spotify, and her albums “Mañana Será Bonito” (2023) and “Tropicoqueta” (2025) helped reinvent the sound of contemporary Latin. She emerged from the reggaeton thunderstorm that hijacked the planet, but then guided it smoothly into a different aesthetic territory, far away from the movement’s misogynistic toxicity. Her ongoing collaboration with producer Ovy On The Drums — they’re the same age, 35, both from Medellín — was transformative, combining clanging, tribal beats with liquid textures and a refined, champagne-like lightness.
Part of the massive “Viajando Por El Mundo Tropitour,” Friday’s performance confirmed the singer’s stature as one of the most vital and charismatic Latin artists of the 21st century. More than a conventional concert, it felt like a stark, delirious fantasia, a relentless cinematic mosaic of decadent dance numbers and hyper-popped fragmentation presented in five acts, unified by a tropical visual motif: lush vegetation; a blue lagoon where cleansing erotic rituals take place; plumes of purifying fire to expiate the aftertaste of all those failed romances.
(Jill Connelly / For De Los)
Beginning with the wicked reggaeton beat of “Latina Foreva” — an existential jam about curves and pleasure, the freedom of the flesh — Karol ignited a deafening roar of adoration from the full-capacity crowd. For a moment, I got a taste of what Beatlemania must have sounded like in the 1960s.
As the cameras followed her closely, projecting every playful grimace and flirtatious wink onto the giant video screens, the complexity of her artistic persona became increasingly transparent: an indomitable woman who is deeply connected with primal joy and sensuality, but also vulnerable enough to get her heart broken on the way to the red carpet (and still embrace the experience). In the world of Karol G, what doesn’t kill you makes for an international hit.
Admittedly, it was the aggressive, in-your-face numbers that worked best. Karol sounds even better when surrounded by half-naked dancers — “Gatúbela” and “Ojos Ferrari” were highlights in that respect — and the choreography evoked the sweaty rapture of a full-blown Roman orgy.
(Jill Connelly / For De Los)
But she’s also smart enough to alternate the futurism of neo-reggaeton (the cutting-edge territory where her work with producers like Ovy On The Drums and Tainy has given us some astonishing records) with an affectionate nod to the past glories of Afro-Caribbean lore: the 20th century cultural bubble where Colombian families listened to the “14 Cañonazos Bailables” compilations during the Christmas season.
On the title track of “Tropicoqueta,” she draws an imaginary line that connects her current sexual emancipation to the frisky downbeats of 1950s mambo and the early 2000s movement that jazzed up the Afro-Caribbean classics with a digital bounce. On Friday, she salsified “Provenza” and added the riff of Willie Colón’s “La Murga” as an intro to “Tusa.” Her visual recreation of the “Tropicoqueta” album cover onstage was one of the show’s wittiest moments.
At one point after the success of “Mañana Será Bonito,” Karol must have realized that her newly acquired diva status gave her the chance to voice some valuable thoughts on the merits of Latin American culture.
In between songs, Karol spoke with compassion about the recent earthquakes affecting Colombia and Venezuela — the latter of which is where her poised opening act, Elena Rose, also hails from — but her pan-Latino ideology seeped into the music as well. Her face was covered in tears after she performed “Ese Hombre Es Malo” backed by female mariachi players. At the end of the show, a stunning reading of “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido” revealed the instinctive ease with which she can navigate the sweet, syncopated phrasing of Dominican merengue.
A few tracks from her recently released sixth studio album,”No Me Arrepiento De Sentir Tanto,” displayed a more introspective side. On the dreamy ballad “Después de Ti,” she was joined on guitar by Greg Gonzalez of Cigarettes After Sex, reenacting their performance together from April, when Karol headlined Coachella.
The deafening volume at SoFi was the only aspect of the show that got in the way. The sound stage felt bludgeoned into submission throughout, as the intense distortion of bass, percussion and guitars made the instrument separation within the mix almost inaudible.
That said, the overall experience transcended the sonic elements, as Karol is clearly using the Tropitour as a good reason to celebrate her extraordinary achievements with the fans (she even hugged a security guard).
Somewhere in the venue, a young Latina girl must have been dazzled by this extravagant spectacle and perhaps dreamed of one day following in the footsteps of Carolina Giraldo Navarro: a gifted singer and composer, a woman intelligent enough to cherish the emotional value of dancing the night away.
And that is one solid role model to have.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Destination Moon (1950) – Film Masters Blu-ray – HorrorFuel.com: Reviews, Ratings and Where to Watch the Best Horror Movies & TV Shows
With their latest rocket experiment ending in flames n’ failure, Dr. Charles Cargraves (Warner Anderson) and his rocket lovin’ bud, General Thayer (Tom Powers) seek some outside cash to achieve their ultimate goal, sending man to the moon!
They soon enlist smooth-talkin’ aeronautics tycoon Jim Barnes (John Archer) to convince his equally loaded peers to invest in the project… and he isn’t afraid to enlist a then-popular animated bird to lend a helping wing (more on this below dear readers!) to that end!
Before long the project is complete, but the local populace are having a bitch-fest about the radiation they believe the project will surely release… even though the rocket, the Luna, uses steam propulsion… so our heroes decide to launch the rocket early, because fuck the public, that’s why!
With Cargraves, Thayer, et. al. (along with wise-assing substitute radio operator Joe Sweeney (Dick Wesson)) acting as crew, the group soon find themselves in space… but after a hard landing on the lunar surface wastes gobs of their fuel, their chances of getting home are in jeopardy… space jeopardy!
Directed by Irving Pichel, and written by a cadre of screenwriters including science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers), Destination Moon manages to steer clear of the leaden pace of many 1950’s more scientific-minded space pics, and instead offers a yarn filled with suspense and clever effects.
That’s not to say the pic doesn’t contain plenty of speculative scientific jargon and tech (some of which is on the money, especially with funding for space technology coming from the private sector), because it surely does… but the plight of the protagonists provides plenty of sci-fi spectacle to balance things out… and the story is well structured with each section of the rockets journey, from creation to utilization, engaging and full of tension once the crew gets to space.
As the film was produced by George Pal (1953’s The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine) you can rest assured there are a plethora of early 1950’s special effects wizardry utilized to make us believe in the daring journey to the stars at hand including large matte paintings, clever sets, wire-work and even a smattering of stop-motion!
On the other side of the coin, there are some unintentionally hilarious moments as our heroes look like they are going to absolutely bust a nut in ecstasy every-time G-forces effect the ship… and the appearance of Woody fucking Woodpecker in a sizzle reel to get investors to fund the rocket it’s jarring as all fuck… and it seemingly goes on forever (but in the positive corner this was entirely new animation produced just for the film).
Accompanying Destination Moon on this Film Masters blu-ray are a duo of audio commentaries (one a scholarly analysis of the film courtesy of Film Historian Justin Humphreys, and the other a thirty nine minute fact and anecdote-packed interview recreation with the late fright flick archivist Bob Burns by film Historian Tom Weaver), a new “making of” mini-doc, a restored version of the film’s trailer, and a pressbook gallery.
Also included is a second disc featuring Lesley Selander’s Flight to Mars from 1951…
Things get a bit lower stakes with this one, as we get our ragtag group of philosophizing scientists and such on board a rocket and blasted to space with the first fifteen minutes of this one, so we get none of creation of the technology needed for the mission which proved really entertaining in Destination Moon… it also goes without saying we don’t get any Woody Woodpecker here… we don’t even get a Chilly Willy cartoon…
After tangling briefly with a meteor shower our crew touches down on Mars… roughly… and after trudging through snow under red skies the gang finds man-made structures… and those that built them!
Will our heroes find friends on the Red Planet or are the intentions of the aliens much more sinister?!!
First things first, the martians here truly suck ass… they sport left-over spacesuits from Destination Moon… when they aren’t dressing like they just stumbled out of a Flash Gordon serial… and consist of normal looking middle-aged men and a lady or two.
As you may have surmised, this is much more of a pulpy sci-fi yarn… we do get some postulating and such, but the inclusion of the aliens make this much more “unrealistic” than the former film in this release, and the concentration here is on the alien society more than the journey it took to get there.
The sets are retro-future cool, and are presented via matte paintings and such, but they lack the impact of those in Destination Moon… and the suspense is much reduced here as well.
As before, we get special features to supplement the feature including another commentary track from Humphreys, a look at the more science-heavy sci-fi features of the ‘50s, a mini-doc on the film’s producer, Walter Mirisch (1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and a restored version of Flight to Mars’ trailer.
Also included in the package is a full color booklet with a new essay by Author Sloan deForest.
Two voyages into the deep reaches of space presented two different ways, this pairing of Destination Moon and Flight to Mars is an enjoyable dip into the early days of 1950’s space-obsessed sci-fi!
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