It's been over three years since the last Jackass movie, and over ELEVEN years since a new episode of the show was aired on MTV. The landscape of prank-comedy has since changed, as has the landscape of Jackass itself. One of their crew, Ryan Dunn, unfortunately passed away, while the rest of the gang, all in their late 20's/early 30's when the show began, are now heading into their 40's, which is just too old to be eating poop for a living. So it was time to mix things up a little, which is exactly what Bad Grandpa has done, and unfortunately, not entirely for the better.
Gone is the scattershot tone of a bunch of stunts one after the other, Bad Grandpa goes a more Borat-type route by having a "plot", held together by stunts and reaction shots. Knoxville plays the 86-year old Irving Zisman, whose wife has just passed away and he plans to relive his bachelor days. However, his daughter shows up and drops his grandson Billy (Jackson Nicoll) off with him, as she's about to be taken to jail for drugs charges. So Irving must drive Billy across the country to his dead-beat Dad, and along the way, chaos ensues.
Or at least that was the plan, but the film never really goes off in the way you might expect or hope. Anyone who has seen the trailer, or even seen a previous Jackass movie, will already have seen the highlights of this movie, with the rest just kind of … sitting there, almost lifeless. There are a few occasions when you may find yourself smiling, sometimes even guffawing, but there's never a point when you'll be bent over double in pain from laughing so hard, like has happened with all of the previous Jackass movies.
It was a wise move to switch up the format a little, and Knoxville and Nicoll are both fantastic in their roles, dead-panning even as the people are freaking out around them, but there's no point to any of this. Jackass was about having fun, but Bad Grandpa just seems to be about dumb Americans being made fun of by a slightly smarter American in old-man make-up with his old man balls hanging out.