Jackass 3D

When I saw the trailer for “Jackass 3D,” to say I was excited would be a gross understatement. “Jackass” first came out when I was a freshman in high school, so you might say I was their perfect target demographic. After that, doing stupid stunts, getting kicked in the balls, and just generally being an idiot was the way in which we all got through the school day. The show was a great experiment, but the first movie upped the ante. The first movie still to this day is hilarious and has two of the funniest jokes of my life. So when I saw the “Jackass 3D” trailer, I thought that finally they had found a proper way to use 3D technology. Forget “Avatar,” this is the movie 3D was made for. So where does it all go wrong?

It’s been ten years and it’s hard to recapture the magic of the original show. Also, how many more stupid things are left to do? They have pretty much done them all. The whole cast is older and richer and sober and has families and so the devil-may-care attitude is just not there. Now they have something to lose instead of everything to gain. It seems like everyone in the show is over it. The movie starts out hilarious as always. Seriously, I haven’t laughed so hard in a very long time and for that alone its worth seeing, but it runs out of steam. It seems like they concocted a lot of the stunts in this one specifically for 3D and they just don’t really work as well. After about an hour the movie just drags on and the laughs are less frequent. The first movie is seminal, and amazing, and everything was pushed to the limit. That film is still watchable again and again. It’s hard to recapture that.

The movie ends with a montage of all the Jackass guys in the good old days, with pictures of them as kids, and a song playing whose only lyric I can remember is “memories make me want to go back there.” That to me is the saddest thing; it signifies that it’s the end of an era. It also brings back memories for me, of the time all the boys tried to jump the hedge at the bottom of the stairs during lunch, most of them landing flat on their faces or getting stabbed by branches. Or the time, my friend Amir choked himself till he passed out and I had to catch him so he didn’t break his skull on the concrete floor. Thinking about the past always makes me sad because we can’t go back there, as much as we want to. But who cares, the Jackass guys are all awesome, and they deserve all the money they already made. I’m no expert but that movie couldn’t have cost more than a half a million dollars to make, and it’s already made a hundred times that. They definitely earned it.

Correction: The movie apparently cost $20 million to make... who knew?