Parents' Guide to Jackass: The Movie

Jackass is an endurance contest for adolescents (and perpetual adolescents) and a comedy for people so bereft of empathy that they think it's funny to see people hurt themselves. When deciding whether to see Jackass, you should ask yourself one question: How enjoyable would it be to watch people abuse their bodies to perform stunts in the most grotesque manner imaginable? If you answered, "highly enjoyable and extremely amusing," this is your movie. Anyone else, however, should run screaming in the other direction.

To give you a taste of the movie's humor, one of the stunts involves a man snorting wasabi up his nose and then proceeding to vomit it out. Another stunt involves a man eating a snow cone -- except that in this case the man has urinated on the snow, and therefore knows he's eating his own bodily waste. Another involves a man using the demo toilet in a store's plumbing display, even though it's not hooked up to any plumbing. Then there are the stunts involving stuffing objects not intended for that purpose into bodily orifices also not intended for that purpose. The most appropriate commentary on the movie comes from a cameraman, who becomes so disgusted that he throws up, which, of course, gets incorporated into the movie. Even for people who enjoy bathroom humor, Jackass wears thin because its unremitting brand of literally painful bathroom humor just isn't funny.