Nothing good is coming from the movie “Jackass 3D.” Besides branding grotesque images into my mind that I may never be able to erase, this movie is a teenage boy’s mother’s worst nightmare.
Never mind a plot 8212; this movie lacks any theatrical structure. “Jackass 3D” simply consists of one vigorously dumb stunt after the next, performed by a group of not quite boy-aged men who are, in reality, not the group of best friends they make themselves out to be.
This ridiculously low-budget “reunion” is causing a stir and could escalate the number of teenage deaths because of imitation stunts. One particular concern is that more teenagers will be encouraged to join in the trend of car surfing.
Car surfing is riding on top of a moving car, other variations include ghost riding, in which no one is behind the wheel at all. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, car surfing caused 58 deaths and 41 serious injuries between 1990 and 2008, and those are just the statistics on record.
The phrase “boys will be boys” definitely comes to mind, but stunts like car surfing and the ones shown in “Jackass 3D” are no joke. It could be said that worse catastrophes are shown in other, more intense movies, but the difference here is that this movie is so casually made, it seems as though any individual could pull off the stunts. It will be incredibly sad, but also interesting to see, if the numbers of deaths and injuries due to stunt imitations rise dramatically a year from now.
If the “Jackass” TV show was stupid and pointless, at least it was regularly comical with tiny outbreaks of cleverness. The Jackass movie, however, takes the show into four-wheel drive, crashing past all lines and barriers of appropriateness. The only thing worse than watching naked men perform body tricks is watching it in 3-D.
What then, can be said about the entertainment factor of the movie? I will admit I cracked up laughing at different scenes during the film, but by the end, I felt so nauseated that I could no longer recall what I had found so funny. Perhaps weak-stomached viewers like myself should never venture into a movie like “Jackass” in the first place, but I did, and now I feel a personal obligation to warn my girlfriends against it.
I may hold a deeper personal bias against the movie because a student and football player at my high school died from a car stunt. A movie like this can only inspire more avoidable deaths.
After fuming over the recklessness of “Jackass,” I researched “Jackass injuries” and found a list of top five painful moments for one of the main performers, Bam Margera. Margera recounts his most agonizing injuries, including smashing his tailbone, receiving serious facial scarring after face diving into concrete, ripping his liver, tearing every ligament in his arm and cracking his skull. I could partially forgive some of the dangerous suggestions the movie makes if the producers would have included a few more facts like these.
Sammy Key is a junior English and Spanish double major from Tulsa, Okla.