Review of Jackass 3D (2010) by Shiira — 18 Oct 2010

Try this analogy on for size: "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut" is to Stephen Sondheim, as "Jackass" is to Jackie Chan. The analogy fits. Say what you will about Johnny Knoxville and his motley assemblage of senescent frat boys; they're stupid, immature, and complete lacking in judgement, you say, but it's hard to dismiss the long-running freak show outrightly for this one simple fact: Its star and his cast of idiots do their own stunts.

The pre-credit safety advisory is warranted. The element of risk involved can sometimes be quite substantial. No question about it, Knoxville and his misadventurous crew have got some Chan-sized balls, although the de facto balls(belonging to Chris Pontius) are not open for debate as to whether the question of graphic male nudity was something we needed to see.

Appropriately enough, no Year of the Ass appears in the Chinese calendar, but Year of the Horse does, and Chan, born in 1954, just happens to be a horse. When a stunt goes wrong, even a brilliant stuntman such as Chan can end up looking like a jackass.

For instance, during the blooper real in his self-directed "Armour of God", Chan, jumping off a bridge, misses his mark, a tree, and falls, clutching at leaves and branches on the way down. The Hong Kong superhero's unsuccessful stunt makes him look mortal, good for a few laughs, but you see the inherent danger involved, which is, of course, "Jackass" in a nutshell, where serious injury or death are always real possibilities.

In "Jackass 3D", well-executed antics, like the one in which Knoxville comes crashing down along with a toppled tree that had been chopped, may produce the same reaction from the moviegoer as Chan's outtake from "Armour of God": laughter, but here, it's with less reverence and regard, since the former MTV star's dangerous stunt is enmeshed with copious amounts of good-natured, albeit "retarded", homosocial behavior(aka male bonding), which trivializes the reality of imminent death, and yet there's the same principality of risk that Chan undertook back in his daredevil heyday.

The stunts performed by Knoxville and his buddies are the equivalent of the Trey Parker/Matt Stone songbook: juvenile, but surreptitiously classicist, as the lyrics of "Uncle Fu*ka", analogous to the Santa get-up that the jackass dons, are dislocated elements, whose puerility seemingly eats its subjects alive, due to the prevailing sobriety of the Broadway musical and chopsocky cinema.

But the subjects survive, both the bestiality and other indelicate citations of "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut", as well as the sophomoric spectacle of dumb that distracts from the secondary spectacle of imperilling circumstances in "Jackass 3D".

By no means should there be the suggestion that Johnny Knoxville and Jackie Chan are peers in any shape or form, since the donkey(the jackass), after all, is the lesser horse, but the "Jackass" franchise can definitely be construed as a synthesis of anarchy against and affinity for Chan's body of work(the pre-Hollywood years), a testament to laughing in the face of death, a redneck shade of red.

According to multiple sources, Stephen Sondheim gave his approval to the "South Park" musical, calling it one of the best musicals in recent memory. He was able to see beyond all those layers of vulgarity, and realized that the farcical film actually honored his profession in its own f*cked up way.

Can Chan do the same? Maybe. They're interconnected, the two, since Sondheim, born on March 22, 1930, was also, according to the Chinese calendar, a Year of the Horse baby.