Jackass 3D – Review

Writing a review for something like Jackass 3D seems as critical as writing blurbs for Youtube videos, as perhaps in all of cinema, there’s nothing more critic proof than the Jackass franchise. Since its humble inception in 2000, the decade of Jackass (did I really just say that?) has proved to be a spring board of everything that is sort of wrong with the Internet today. Making something, anything and uploading it into the Web can make anyone a star, and any groin kick or slap to the back of the head can equal a little laughter and a slew of copy cats filling up bandwith on Youtube, making it even harder to search for what we really want on that site. Rude, mean-spirited, raunchy, gross, vile, stupid, and blah blah blah, for if anything, whatever the backlash of the Youtube culture, Jackass has proven to be culture defining.

As Tyler Durden once said: “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.” That assessment sums up the phenomenon of Jackass. So, with all this on the table the number one question still remains, is Jackass still funny? After ten years of this stuff, hell yeah. Let’s take it a step further. Did it need to be in 3D? Absolutely.

The pain, the suffering, the vomiting in 3D allows us to play into their gross charade. After Jackass 3D, a film that nearly made me vomit three times and after the tooth being pulled out with a Lamborghini, I still physically hurt. But I want to shake Jeff Tremaine’s hand for crafting the best use of 3D yet. It literally groin kicks Avatar. The stuff is funny, perhaps always will be, as all it is was a gross-out version of the work of Charlie Chaplin, but the 3D makes the pain real, visualizing the hurt with some gorgeous slo-mo. The port-a-potty filled with various excrement that has Steve-O achieving is, well, possibly the grossest and coolest 3D gag ever in the history of 3D.

While the gags seem a little tired at first, Jackass 3D is a side-splitting hilarious coda to a generational gift from a few lovable idiots that balked at the notion that not everyone can keep their fifteen minutes of fame. As brilliant as that statement was from artist Andy Warhol, Jackass 3D slaps that assessment with a wet rubbery one, as they proved that penis jokes, vomiting, pranks, and pain, can be – when done idiotically right – high art.

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