96 min | R | February 4, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
Johnny Knoxville and the crew are middle-aged now, and they have come back to break each other’s bodies one more time. The stunts are louder and the men are older. Turns out friendship is just the willingness to take a bull to the chest for the bit.
Johnny Knoxville and his crew are older now. The film knows it. A decade after the last entry, the men who built careers on self-destruction return to inflict pain on each other and absorb it in turn. Jeff Tremaine opens with a kaiju parody and proceeds through a catalog of stunts involving animals, electricity, and the human body’s tolerance for impact. Underneath the gross-out engineering, the movie is about aging men who can only express affection by hurting one another.
Knoxville plays the ringleader as a man who still leads from the front and pays for it with his body. He takes a bull charge that lands harder than anything a younger man would attempt. Steve-O commits to the franchise’s most degrading premises with the same eagerness he had twenty years ago. Chris Pontius, Dave England, and Preston Lacy slot back into roles built on humiliation and trust. Ehren McGhehey absorbs the worst of the punishment and keeps volunteering for more. The new recruits get hazed into the group, and the veterans watch their own youth in them.
Tremaine directs from a script he wrote with Spike Jonze and Knoxville, and the construction is more deliberate than the chaos suggests. The reveal-and-react editing is the engine. Each stunt cuts between the slow-motion impact and the surrounding crew doubled over in laughter, and the reaction shots carry the comedy more than the injury does. The sound design isolates every thud and crack against the silence before it. The camaraderie reads on screen because the camera stays on the men watching, not just the man suffering.
This is a reunion that understands what it is selling. The stunts are the product. The friendship is the reason anyone keeps doing them. Tremaine has the sense to film the bond as plainly as the brutality and let the two amplify each other. The result is exactly what it promises and nothing more, executed by people who genuinely love each other and prove it by causing harm.