Jackass: The Movie

This is a boy's own, pants down exhibitionist's field day. Soiled underwear and vomit are given high marks. It's also a critic-free zone, which means that what you are about to read has been denigrated by Jackass aficionados as lavatory waste.

Spawned from an MTV series, in which nine guys do stupid, dangerous things just for the hell of it, there is neither script nor safety net. It's not a movie so much as a longer TV show that makes Dumb And Dumber look intelligent.

They take the practical joke and dehumanise it. They think up stunts that hurt to watch. There is no artistry, no skill, no brain.

Imagine a group of high school dropouts behaving badly on a road trip. There doesn't appear to be any alcohol or drugs around, certainly no girls, which means they get their kicks from destroying property, scaring people and inflicting pain. Watching staged accidents and self-torture isn't food for thought.

When not laughing their heads off at someone else's near death experience, they are thinking up embarrassing things to do, which, more often than not, involve parts of the body that once was considered private. Taking a prize fighter into a Japanese department store and allowing him to punch you senseless is as mad as letting your stomach be a target for plastic bullets.

You can't but admire their enthusiasm for trying new forms of stupidity. Who else would volunteer to be hurled into a cactus, or walk a tightrope over a pool of hungry alligators?

It's so laddish and juvenile, only teenage boys could possibly find it funny. Old people, fat people, foreigners, hire car company staff, golfers, doctors and a fortune teller are mocked mercilessly.

It might make hilarious television late at night, when the faculties have been compromised by a six pack and a doobie, but stone cold in a multiplex even the Farrely brothers would find Jackass tacky, amateurish and cinematically void.