By Jackass sure has come a long way. From a small show on MTV, to a nationwide sensation, to a full sized film, and now a cutting edge 3D movie to keep pace with the pulse of the latest industry advancements. That’s quite the distance for such an immature show to grow, and while it’s nowhere near as mind numbing as Idiocracy’s fake show Ow My Balls, it’s still the type of movie you have to be in the right mood for. Unfortunately, even though Jackass 3D was exactly the type of easy entertainment that I needed to take my mind off my busy schedule, I was still disappointed with it overall.
Jackass sure has come a long way. From a small show on MTV, to a nationwide sensation, to a full sized film, and now a cutting edge 3D movie to keep pace with the pulse of the latest industry advancements. That’s quite the distance for such an immature show to grow, and while it’s nowhere near as mind numbing as Idiocracy’s fake show Ow My Balls, it’s still the type of movie you have to be in the right mood for. Unfortunately, even though Jackass 3D was exactly the type of easy entertainment that I needed to take my mind off my busy schedule, I was still disappointed with it overall.
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The format hasn’t changed much with this one, and it’s still essentially a few dozen skits and stunts stapled together. Plenty of familiar faces grace the screen – as do most of their bodily fluids – but it felt like a few people were missing from the past. The movie begins with many of the scenes shown in the trailer and it’s a visual rush of trying to use the new 3D format as ridiculously as possible, but then the focus on 3D takes a backseat throughout most of the movie. To be honest, the true star of the film was the slow motion technology that was used frequently to show off every bit of the painful details.
After a while you start to long for something big to outdo all they’ve done in the past, and sadly, it never comes. I feel bad saying that riding a jet ski over a wall and getting rammed by a bull isn’t enough to please me, and I kindly thank them for putting their bodies on the line for our amusement, but years of Internet videos have set the bar pretty high by now. Eventually the show brings back Grandpa Knoxville and Bam Margera family antics, but even those don’t feel up to par with their earlier videos. Then the movie ends on a predictable and underwhelming finale that’s only entertaining because it’s shown in slow motion.
Sure, I laughed from start to finish, but the scorpion scene is probably the only one that really made me shout and snort. There were too many skits that felt underwhelming and overcompensated by having extra time spent on showing others in the room laughing far out of proportion to what they witnessed, as if forcing their expressions. One addition to the film that was great were the recurring “Rocky” scenes where people on set simply got decked in the face when they least expected it, but it was too brittle of a backbone for the movie to fall back on.
I was a big fan of the past Jackass movies, but I don’t think this film’s lack of success has to do with us having years of YouTube under our belts by now; it's the fact that the movie had a hard time adding anything unique to what it’s done in the past. It could be blamed on the cast growing older and becoming frailer, but I think it just comes down to a lack of ingenuity. It’s not that videos online go to bigger and better extremes, it’s that I see more clever pranks and stunts on Tosh.0 each week. When your movie is getting bested by random nobodies on the Internet, then it’s probably time to call it quits.
Overall Score: 5.40 – Bad. (5s are movies that either failed at reaching the goals it set out to do, or didn’t set out to do anything special and still had many flaws. Some will enjoy 5s, but unless you’re a fan of this genre, you shouldn’t see it, and might not even want to rent it.)
Jackass 3D brings less laughs than expected, and far less 3D than expected. We knew we'd have penises waving around in our faces the second we heard it was going to be in 3D, but beyond that it's basically the same stunts we've seen before but in weak 3D. At this rate, I'd rather watch Tosh.0 or click random buttons on YouTube than see another Jackass movie for full price.
