Can Johnny Knoxville Pull It Off Ten Years Later?

Johnny Knoxville has a new movie out.  It's a saga that continues where Knoxville began, with the original television show on MTV. The premise is simple: Grown men doing foolishly dangerous and often crude tricks and pranks. One of the trailers shows two guys wearing a pair of shorts each and playing tether ball...with a bee hive!

     Even the advertisements for the new movie suggests, “neither you nor your little buddies should attempt anything from this movie.” Sage advice, indeed. The whole idea behind the Jackass shows began when Knoxville (whose real name is Philip John Clapp...really...you can't make some things up), unable to break into the movie world in California, began to test self-defense equipment on himself and ended up being filmed doing it by Jeff Tremaine. The situation then morphed into Big Brother magazine's Number Two video. By the time the Jackass idea had been sold to MTV, film director Spike Jonze was part of the project.

    To his credit, Knoxville doesn't just ask his friends to perform stupid tricks or dangerous stunts, he puts himself right out front. Like the time, before Jackass became a phenomena when he shot himself in the chest with a .38 handgun. He was wearing body armor, but he has admitted it was pretty cheap body armor. He obviously survived.

    Surely, if you saw this guy coming up the driveway, you'd slam the garage door shut and disable the mechanism that allows someone to use a remote garage door opener (oh, 'cause you know Knoxville has a garage door opener in his back pocket!)

    But he has a legion of friends and fans (and maybe fiends) of all ages who love him and laugh hysterically at the stunts he and his friends pull through thick and thin. He has kept his apparently most loyal and laughable friends in his TV show and movies, faces most of us recognize instantly even if we don't recall their names right away.

    Admittedly, there is a good belly-laugh in the movie when the huge spring-loaded papier-mache hand slams into people and knocks them down. But the cautionary tale, nonetheless, is “Don't try this at home...or anywhere else, for that matter.”