The Jackass star suffers an erratic run through a slew of uneasy skits in Tim Kirkby’s underpowered comedy
Still no sign of that Adventureland sequel, but this week brings us a puzzling film in which 47-year-old Johnny Knoxville, in the guise of a renegade theme-park operator, gets to rag on millennials for their observance of basic health-and-safety codes. Cinema, like life, is rarely fair. If Knoxville’s Jackass movies were, for better and frequently for worse, everything they set out to be, Action Point looks very much like the kind of PG-13 rated compromise – gooey teen coming-of-ager, with stunts attached – which studio Paramount might have imposed on the Jackass doofi had producer-director Spike Jonze not had their back. Watching it is like travelling through a wormhole to a slightly crummier version of 2004.
The sense of a fading star looking over a repeatedly dislocated shoulder is underlined by the new film’s framing. Bookend scenes find Knoxville, in Bad Grandpa latex, reminiscing with a grandchild about the late 70s heyday in which his beat-up backwoods attraction’s fortunes were transformed when the rides’ speed limiters were removed. The upshot is an erratic run of skits, assembled with neither rhyme nor reason, in which Knoxville and loyal second Chris Pontius are knocked over, or have live squirrels introduced to their nethers, or chuckle at the sight of copulating dogs. Some of these – like an incident involving a siege catapult – are just blunt enough to force out a fleeting snicker; most yield frowns or uneasy grimaces.
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