Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew assemble their own farewell from the archive

The last Jackass movie is not built the way a movie usually is. “Jackass: Best and Last” is an assembly, a reel of stunts, skits and pranks cut against fresh talking-head footage of the people who survived them. There is no plot to spoil and no character to follow except the crew itself, older now and narrating its own greatest hits from the relative safety of a chair. The film announces in its structure what it has decided to be: not another gauntlet, but a record of every gauntlet that came before.

That choice is the whole argument. Rather than stage one more feature-length stretch of broken ribs, director Jeff Tremaine has gone into the vault, pulling the sharpest material from the franchise’s run across television and four theatrical films, then threading it with footage never released and bits shot specifically to close the book. The result is less a sequel than a curated memory, a strange and revealing way for a series this physical to end, and a confident one. A crew with nothing left to prove gets to decide which version of itself survives.

The cast is the subject and the thesis at once. Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, Dave England, Preston Lacy and Ehren “Danger Ehren” McGhehey return alongside the newer recruits — Poopies, Zach Holmes, Jasper Dolphin and Rachel Wolfson — and the lineup reads as a roll call rather than a star vehicle. Knoxville has put it plainly, calling this “the natural place to end.” The casting confirms the sentiment. Nobody on screen is auditioning for a next chapter; they are there to be counted, one last time, among the people who agreed to this.

Tremaine has shaped every version of this thing, from the cable-era show through the theatrical run, and his instinct has always been editorial as much as anarchic, a matter of knowing which take lands, which reaction to hold on, when a wince is funnier than the impact that caused it. Producing alongside Spike Jonze and Knoxville, he approaches the compilation as a final edit on a quarter-century of footage, deciding in the cut what the franchise was actually about once the shock wears off. That is a director’s job, not a daredevil’s, and it is the one the film hands him.

What it was about, the assembly quietly insists, was repetition and consent: the same small group agreeing, over and over, to do the unsurvivable to one another and call it friendship. The talking-head structure leans into the idea. A stunt plays, and then the person who took it explains, at a remove, what it actually cost. It is the closest the series has come to admitting the joke had a body count — the concussions, the burns, the surgeries — even as it keeps the mood celebratory and moves quickly to the next clip.

There is a larger stake the film mostly leaves implicit. This crew did not just make stunt comedy popular; it defined the modern version of the form, the handheld, consent-forward, reaction-driven prank film that a generation of online performers later inherited. Closing the franchise means closing a template. Whatever follows in the genre will be measured against a group that treated its own pain as the only special effect it needed, and “Best and Last” is built to make that lineage legible before it signs off.

The format also shields the film from its hardest questions. A greatest-hits reel is a victory lap, and a victory lap cannot interrogate itself. Bam Margera, a founding presence, appears only in archive footage, his absence from the new material left unexplained on screen, a gap the celebratory frame is not designed to close. And a compilation cannot reckon honestly with what two decades of self-harm-as-entertainment did to these bodies and the people inside them. It can show the highlights and let the older faces narrating them imply the cost, but implication is as far as the structure will go.

Credited principals include Knoxville, Steve-O, Pontius, Wee Man, Dave England, Preston Lacy and Danger Ehren, joined by Poopies, Zach Holmes, Jasper Dolphin and Rachel Wolfson, with Margera present in archive material. Tremaine directs from a production he shares with Spike Jonze and Knoxville, and Paramount Pictures distributes. The film runs 92 minutes and carries documentary, comedy and action billing at once, an unusual combination that fits a project trying to be both a performance and the record of one.

“Jackass: Best and Last” opens in United States theaters on June 26, 2026, with theatrical bookings across Europe and Latin America landing the same week. Whether it proves to be the actual last of them is its own kind of dare; the crew has announced endings before, but as a closing statement it is unambiguous. The people who built the franchise have chosen how to be remembered: in their own voices, from their own footage, laughing at the damage on the way out.