Metacritic Film

Jackass: The Movie

Starring Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Chris Pontius, Steve-O, Dave England, Ryan Dunn, Jason 'Wee Man' Acuña, and Tony Hawk

MPAA RATING: R for dangerous, sometimes extremely crude stunts, language and nudity

Paramount Pictures
Comedy
80 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters October 25, 2002

Johnny Knoxville and his crew of crazies take the concept of the MTV show "Jackass" - a bunch of guys doing dangerous and disturbing stunts just to see what happens - and turn it into a movie.

WRITTEN BY
Jeff Tremaine (television series)
Spike Jonze (television series)
Johnny Knoxville (television series)

DIRECTED BY
Jeff Tremaine

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

42 / 100

Critic Reviews

80 LA Weekly
The Jackass boys achieve true genius, however, when they take their penance public. Before stunned, inert onlookers, these skate-punk Situationists transform official zones of work and leisure -- office parks, golf courses, bowling alleys -- into arenas of dangerous stupidity to remind us that, in the end, we’re all just meat.
80 Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
One of the funniest films I’ve seen all year.
75 Entertainment Weekly
Provokes a suspense halfway between comedy and horror. I'm not sure if I enjoyed myself, exactly, but I could hardly wait to see what I'd be appalled by next.
70 Village Voice Ed Halter
Shrewdly, the Jackass gang didn't mess with their established formula in the transition to the big screen.
67 Austin Chronicle
All told, either you get it or you don't. Film critics and senators with election prospects don't. Kids in the mood to laugh at stupid shit for 87 minutes do. I'll toss my hat in the latter ring with glee.
63 Miami Herald
As much as I laughed throughout the movie, I cannot mount a cogent defense of the film as entertainment, or even performance art, although the movie does leave you marveling at these guys' superhuman capacity to withstand pain. Compared to these jackasses, Vin Diesel is a big, overpaid wuss.
50 Chicago Reader
Unfortunately I can't give this a thumbs-up or thumbs-down; I haven't yet developed an aesthetic that will accommodate a guy firing a bottle rocket from his ass.
50 Los Angeles Times
At their best, they're closer to the Three Stooges; at their most banal, they're as original as the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing nude with socks on their penises -- It's a hoot.
40 The New York Times
Like a documentary version of "Fight Club," shorn of social insight, intellectual pretension and cinematic interest. It also offers a supremely literal-minded version of slapstick.
30 Variety
It's plotless, shapeless -- and yet, it must be admitted, not entirely humorless. Indeed, the more outrageous bits achieve a shock-you-into-laughter intensity of almost Dadaist proportions.
25 The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Essentially a slapstick movie with no plot or -- as my boyfriend called it after recovering from 1½ hours of side-splitting laughter -- "the ultimate big-screen TV experience."
20 The Onion (A.V. Club)
Audience members are likely to feel like they're right there in the picture, suffering for no reason and trying to pretend it's funny.
0 New York Post
To call Jackass: The Movie the worst movie of the year is practically a compliment. This plotless, crudely videotaped collection of moronic stunts is a movie in the same sense that those hideous, velvet depictions of Elvis are paintings.
0 New York Daily News
This is the biggest lowdown, rotten, disgusting, depraved sideshow in the megaplex. Check your brains, your taste and your self-respect right over there with the bearded ticket taker.

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