When you watch a Jackass film, you get a good idea of exactly what you can get away with, so long as you dare to get away with it. It’s a bunch. Topple a store icon? Steal a loaf of bread? Aggressively hit on bingo-junkies? Sure. This is, of course, just the tip of the penis when you get the jackass guys involved. Their movies often give you the full schlong.
Johnny Knoxville is currently 42. Given a few hours of heavy make-up, he transforms into Bad Grandpa. This shouldn’t be a giveaway, but if it is, you won’t be alarmed when he gets thrown through a plate-glass window. We’ve seen Johnny’s grandpa character in snippets of past Jackass films. Here, we get a full film to devote to this clandestine prick. The bigger surprise is that Spike Jonze, Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine wrote a real live story around their pranks. It has plot and everything! See, Irving Zisman (Knoxville) has just become a windower. (His deceased wife is played by Spike Jonze, btw, hah! And “she” is busy — falling out of caskets, getting stuffed into trunks, going in and out of motel rooms … no corpse has had this much action since Weekend at Bernie’s.) Due to his daughter’s trouble with the law, Irving is saddled with his grandson Billy (Jackson Nicoll). The child a serious drag on Irving’s action, hence, his course is clear: get Billy to his dad in North Carolina.
What follows then is standard Jackass shtick, Bad Grandpa style. In other words – it’s a Jackass film, but we’ve substituted, say, getting launched in a porta-potty with getting professional movers to move dead grandma around. Bad Grandpa also lacks for the homosexual undertones of previous Jackass offerings. And we get Billy involved from time to time. You know he’s being fed his lines, cuz little boys generally 
don’t assume strange clerks are strippers. One day Jackson Nicoll is going to be an adult. I hope when that happens, he sees cross-dressing in lingerie and pole dancing to Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” on a Little Miss Sunshine stage (straight ripoff, btw) as a highlight of a very strange childhood. I’d hate to think of him regretting this behavior.
While Jackass tends to be the ultimate dare game, Bad Grandpa is an extended legacy of Candid Camera. The premise is exactly the same – you set up an outrageous situation: I’m mailing my grandson to North Carolina; I’m drinking beer in the park with a pre-pubescent child; I’m dangling my exposed foot-long scrotum in a strip club (no, I’m not kidding on that one). Then you film reactions. Bad Grandpa is the logical next step for Candid Camera – pushing the envelope to minor law-breaking and risqué sexuality. Eventually, there will be another step in which bigger laws and greater sexual mores are encroached. My guess is Johnny Knoxville will be permanently disabled by then.
His wife in need of body bag
Old Irving thinks it’s a drag
Having grandson
Harshes his fun
It’s better if you’re in on the gag
Rated R, 92 Minutes
D: Jeff Tremaine
W: Spike Jonze, Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine
Genre: Candid camera
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Your teenage son
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: My wife
