Jackass Number Two

I would like to offer a bit of advice to star Johnny Knoxville and the crew of Jackass Number Two, if I may. Please, quit while you're ahead. If this continues, the only way you're going to be able to top yourselves should there be a Number Three is if one of you winds up in the morgue. That being said, anyone who walks into this movie not knowing what to expect deserves whatever they get. While the premise of seeing a group of extreme stunt idiots get their dues for attempting to perform insanely dangerous stunts should be entertaining in a stupid way, Jackass Number Two unfortunately tends to emphasize the gross out skits over the extreme stunts, which makes the film as much of an endurance test for the audience as it is for anyone unfortunate enough to be up there on the screen. Let me close this opening paragraph by saying if you have ever seriously wondered why Hollywood has not done a movie where someone drinks a bottle of freshly squeezed horse semen from an aroused stallion, the movie event of your lifetime has arrived. For the rest of us, we can wait for the DVD, or leave it up to our imaginations.

For those of you who don't know, Jackass Number Two was inspired by the surprise success of 2002's Jackass: The Movie, which itself was inspired by a popular show on MTV, which itself inspired a number of lawsuits and media attention when stupid kids tried to imitate the stuff they saw on the program. It is a plotless premise built around a series of skits where comic actor Johnny Knoxville and a group of his seemingly-mentally challenged cohorts perform an endless series of dangerous extreme stunts, gross out gags, and lame character skits where someone dresses up as a deranged old person, and tries to get a reaction out of people on the streets, hidden cameras capturing the results. This time around, the guys try a variety of stunts which include being strapped to a rocket as it flies up into the air, testing their luck in a children's ball pit where vicious anaconda snakes slink about, and angering wild charging bulls. A few B-list celebrities such as shock filmmaker, John Waters, and Broken Lizard comedy group member, Jay Chandrasekhar, get in on the fun sometimes, and they even sometimes play pranks on each other, such as when some of Knoxville's guys are in a limo thinking they're on their way to a photo shoot, only to suddenly have Knoxville himself empty a bag full of angry bees into the car through the sunroof.

While some of the stuff is amusing to watch in a twisted sort of way, there's just not enough material here to fill an entire 90-minute movie. Most of the stunt gags are repetitive and built around the exact same premise (someone tries to cross a large body of water with a rocket-propelled shopping cart or roller skates, and immediately falls into the water as soon as their mode of transportation flips over), or the movie keeps on repeating the same gag over and over, such as when Knoxville tricks the guys into reading an oversized Valentine's card that a fan supposedly left outside their hotel room, only to have a spring-loaded boxing glove come flying out to their face. The concepts of the gags are often more amusing than the actual depicted outcome, since there's only so many times you can see someone fall in water or get punched in the face before it starts to lose its novelty. The "man on the street reaction" skits don't hold up much better. These mostly revolve around one of the film's producers, Spike Jonze, dressed as an old lady suffering from a wardrobe malfunction that causes "her" sagging breasts to hang out for people caught on tape to see. The reaction of the people is obvious disgust, shock, and bewilderment, and the movie fails to find anything funny to do with their reactions. They just stop and stare, and nothing else happens. Really, the only skits that registered a laugh with me concerned the mother of one of Knoxville's guys. Her reaction to her son getting a cow brand on his behind is funny, as is her reaction when she becomes a part of one of their skits when they replace her husband with a look a like actor who does some things that she probably doesn't see her husband do very often.

Since most of the stunts and prank skits fall flat, it's up to the gross out skits to get some sort of reaction from the audience. While they certainly succeed here, I often found myself questioning if we have crossed the line from pranks to flat out cruelty. Aside from the previously mentioned horse semen sequence, which I hope I never have to see again, we also get graphic depictions of one of the guys sticking a fish hook directly through the flesh of his mouth, then throwing himself into shark-infested waters, while someone else holding onto the fishing line uses him as bait to attract the swimming predators below. Another sequence has the guys going to a doctor who specializes in leech cures, and they attach a leech to a man's eyeball, forcing him to keep it open as it chomps down upon the white of his eye . Still further forms of torture include watching a man suck beer up through his butt crack, another person get a snake stuck to his penis after he disguises it as a mouse and sticks it through a hole leading into the snake's cage, and one of the guys being forced to wear a beard for a skit, not knowing that it was made out of the pubic hairs of the other cast members. These sequences are more stomach-churning than funny, and an audience that was laughing hysterically during some of the extreme stunt scenes went awkwardly silent during some of these scenes. Perhaps you truly can go too far, even with the rowdiest of audiences.

Jackass Number Two aims low, and yet finds a way to go even lower even when it has reached limits that I would not wish upon anyone. You already know whether or not if you're going to see this movie, so my words are probably meaningless. All I will say is that this movie generated very scattered laughs from me, but I did frequently feel physically ill. Anyone who thinks film critics have a cushy job will shut up pretty quick after experiencing this. At one point of the film, one of cast members makes a request to the heavens that there never be a Jackass Number 3 after going through a particularly dangerous stunt. I can only hope myself that someone was listening that day.

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