Adaptation director Spike Jonze slyly inserts himself somewhere else in the week's film releases - but you won't get to see his face in the feature-length expansion of the iconic stunt show first shown on MTV. In one of the movie's finer pranks, Jonze dons a pretty convincing OAP latex mask and drives his senior citizen cart across pavements and through traffic to the intense irritation of passers-by.
For those unacquainted with the genesis of MTV's most successful movie crossover since Beavis and Butt-head Do America, Jackass is essentially a creative collision between the spirits of World's Wildest Police Chases and Candid Camera, as filtered through the spare-time activities of an engagingly psychotic bunch of skateboarders. Hence the parade of pranks, pratfalls, put-ons, crunches, punch-ups, splatterings and gross-outs, all filmed on wobbly digital handicams, that made Jackass perfect junk TV.
In movie form, nothing much has changed, except for the removal of the MTV's prissy protection of its juvenile market: no bleeps, no pixellation (except for those inadvertent participants who didn't sign release forms) and an honest-to-goodness 18 certificate. Hence we head into areas of prolific cursing, actual soiling of trousers (and on-camera inspection) and insertion of toy cars where the sun doesn't shine. All this actually has a somewhat detrimental effect on proceedings: what on TV comes across as nicely mean-spirited but essentially harmless can look pretty unpleasant and sleazy when played to the full - I mean, it isn't that funny watching a bona-fide torture technique like genital electrocution, even if it is self-inflicted.
Still, the Jackass crew have a pretty good success rate with their blizzard of stunts, illustrating along the way that old Martin Amis line that "nasty things are funny". For Jackass the Movie is genuinely funny, unless you're the firmest-packed of stuffed shirts. From simple stuff like putting an alligator in a family house, to complex set pieces, such as replicating the roomful of traps from the movie Mouse Hunt, the cast demonstrates an apparently inexhaustible ingenuity for pain, foolhardiness and humiliation that is admirably put to the service of entertainment. There's no denying that it's pretty vicious humour, and pretty puerile too, but like previously successful purveyors of such past-the-U-bend comedy, its fresh-faced enthusiasm makes it invulnerable to whatever tired accusations of dumbing-down the humourless might wheel out.
