Part of Midnight Movies
Do Not Attempt This At Home (It’s better on the big screen)!
In 2002, East Tennessean Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of sadomasochistic comrades brought their transgressive, generation-defining small-screen antics into multiplexes around the country in this debut installment in the incredibly rich Jackass Cinematic Universe. Excruciating stunts, gross-out pranks, an unrivaled punk ethos, and basement-traded skate video aesthetics elevate what many at the time considered baseless debauchery to a complex time capsule of male friendship (and nudity) and anarchic glee in post-9/11 America.
This exquisitely bonkers artifact offered a salve to the period’s reinforcement of toxic heteronormativity, onslaught of traditional reality TV, and relentless commercialism, and it provides all the right notes of nostalgia while also kicking off one of the greatest boundary-pushing films about snorting lines of wasabi the artform has to offer.
“Society’s death knell? Performance art taken to its most logical, postmodern conclusion? Or a bunch of fearless stoners arsing (sometimes literally) around and getting paid for it?.... This is pure punk rock cinema.” —Chris Hewitt, Empire Magazine “JACKASS: THE MOVIE is genuinely funny, unless you're the firmest-packed of stuffed shirts…. The cast demonstrates an apparently inexhaustible ingenuity for pain, foolhardiness and humiliation that is admirably put to the service of entertainment…. Its fresh-faced enthusiasm makes it invulnerable to whatever tired accusations of dumbing-down the humourless might wheel out.” —Andrew Pulver, Guardian (UK)
