Growing old (dis)gracefully.

In these dark and depressing times, it’s so often the simple pleasures that keep us going. You know, like seeing a grown man get pummelled in the testicles repeatedly by tiny boxing gloves. That kind of thing.

It’s been twenty-two years since Jackass first stumbled onto our screens, and while the world has changed immeasurably since its debut at the dawn of the millennium, for the various members of the show’s crew, things feel more or less as you were.

Sure, Johnny Knoxville and company may be older, greyer, and (kind of) wiser, yet their antics have changed very little over the last couple of decades. And, quite honestly, there’s something truly comforting in that.

From beginning to end, it’s pretty much as you were with Jackass Forever, with a few OG absentees and a handful of new recruits the only real change from previous efforts, yet therein lies much of its charm. For anyone who grew up watching (and wincing) along with all the various Jackass iterations, a certain sense of nostalgia will be stoked by the sight of this group of kidults still doing the ridiculous stuff that’s been making them laugh for decades now.

If you never got Jackass in the first place, Forever is unlikely to change your mind. It is what it is really, and this latest big screen effort makes no apologies for what it is or any real attempt to do anything different to tempt in new audiences.

Jackass has never really been for everyone, and there’s certain to be a few out there that will roll their eyes at another film full of grown men doing untold damage to their bodies for clout, however, for every other idiot (much like your writer idiot here) that grew up on an (un)healthy dose of these lovable fools and shenanigans, Forever will be everything you could wish for.

Of course, there’s absolutely zero plot, but I’m sure you knew that. Let’s be honest, no one in their right mind goes into any Jackass effort looking for a cohesive narrative. The structure here is as it ever was – a string of well thought out but completely unconnected stunts in the same vein as every other entry in the Jackass canon. And that’s absolutely fine.

Prefaced by a gloriously crass action sequence that features a city under attack from a unique type of kaiju, the rest of Jackass Forever plays it relatively low-key, choosing to reel things in from previous films and closer to the DIY approach of the original MTV series. Not all the stunts quite hit the mark, and some come and go so quickly they barely have time to register, yet they’re never less than entertaining throughout.

This back-to-basics approach brings the Jackass story full circle, and while this latest (and final?) outing has no real story to speak of, the underlying narrative that the ageing bodies of Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Wee Man, Chris Pontius, Dave England, Danger Ehren, and Preston Lacey are visibly close to breaking point is surprisingly affecting.

The collection of new recruits added to the gang may well take over the Jackass mantel from here on in, yet it’s clear that this is almost certainly the last roll of the dice for many of the original crew, and that in itself is enough to add a strange layer of poignancy to things. Grey, gnarled, and sporting more than a few scars from two decades worth of tomfoolery, Knoxville et al look and feel like a lot of us right about now, and there’s something unexpectedly heart-warming in that.

Clocking in at 90 minutes, it’s still debatable whether all the standard Jackass antics can sustain a feature-length outing, yet there’s certainly enough on offer in Forever to keep things engaging at the very least. Ranging from intricately zany to swift and brutal, there’s an admirable variety to the stunts on offer, with a level of ingenuity and a number of call backs to the past to keep things going over its extended running time.

There will almost certainly be accusations that Jackass Forever is doing the same old same old, however, that’d be ignoring much of the movie’s inherent charm. Johnny Knoxville and the gang doing the same thing twenty-two years later, doing it well, and doing with the sole purpose of making one another laugh offers a certain level of catharsis and a simplistic wholesomeness so sorely missing from this brand of entertainment these days.

While it offers little to appease the doubters, Jackass Forever will mean the world to those who’ve followed this gang of idiots for twenty-two years. They may be greyer and more grizzled than ever, yet the admirable energy and enthusiasm from Knoxville and co. is positively infectious, and while the gang’s elder statesmen status may have you wincing that little bit more at all the bone-crunching stunts, there’s an organic warmth that you just can’t fake. The fact that most of them are still with us at all is a miracle in itself, so to see Knoxville, Steve-O, Wee Man et al give it one last whirl two decades after they first hit our screens feels genuinely poignant.