JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (Jeff Tremaine). 90 minutes. Opens Friday (October 25). See listings. Rating: NNN
If nothing else, you’ve got to give the Jackass team credit for being smart about their particular brand of stupidity.
When the stunt-based TV show ran its course, they took their gutter slapstick to the movies with more grand-scale forms of physical punishment. After a 3D finale and the untimely death of Ryan Dunn, they’ve found a way to mature yet still make a movie rooted in Johnny Knoxville damaging his nutsack in public.
Bad Grandpa spins off Knoxville’s longtime old man character Irving Zisman into a Borat-style mixture of hidden-camera pranks and simple storytelling. There’s none of Sacha Baron Cohen’s social satire here, but the belly laugh quotient is high and the creativity of the filmmaking is undeniable.
The film is a three-headed collaboration between Knoxville, series director Jeff Tremaine, and their longtime semi-secret partner Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich). Together they slot a series of outrageous public pranks involving the old man and his 8-year-old grandson (Jackson Nicoll, shockingly good at playing the Jackass game) into a traditional bonding road comedy.
The movie plays like a vintage John Hughes comedy with Jackass interludes and works far better than the concept sounds. The pranks are fun (well, if you find saggy rubber balls funny, anyways) and gently mock public perceptions about cute kids and the elderly, while the threadbare story provides just enough connective tissue and emotional investment to give the filthy comedy a beating heart. Tremaine and Jonze cleverly weave their stunts into something resembling a narrative and mount their hidden cameras in ingenious ways that even gives the project the visual gloss of a traditional road comedy.
Of course, if you don’t like the Jackass franchise, chances are your opinion of Bad Grandpa is already set. This is unapologetic stupidity, but at least unapologetic stupidity at its best. It also highlights the sweetness and innocence that was always part of Jackass. The prank franchise was rooted in genuine friendships, which was palpable for anyone involved in that particular brand of ball-slapping, face-farting bro-downs in their private life.
That element comes through in the more universal intergenerational relationship in a way that some viewers might find surprising. It’s subtle and never detracts from the projectile shit gags, yet shows small signs of maturity and that’s a pleasant surprise. These boys will clearly never grow up, but if they can keep spinning new twists on their popular formula, they just might be able to continue careers as jackasses in their 40s.
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