So the five professional writers of “Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa” sat down to think up ways for Johnny Knoxville, in the guise of an 86-year-old man with an 8-year-old boy by his side, to outrage America. They came up with: Invading the floor of a strip club and letting a rubber dingle-dangle fall out of his shorts. Stuffing a loaf of bread down his pants at a grocery store. Volcanically emptying his colon on the wall of a diner.
Fellas: You could have saved a lot of money by asking some fifth-graders to name the funniest things they could imagine. This whole movie is pretty much a mental colon blow.
Knoxville, as “ Irving Zisman,” tries to hold together this series of candid-camera sketches about a grandfather on a road trip through the middle of the country to return his grandson (Jackson Nicoll) to the boy’s daddy.
The movie is interesting only by accident, such as when Irving wanders into a bar packed with a sexagenarian biker gang of toughs wearing “G.O.C.” gear. “G.O.C.”? “Guardians of the Children,” a hulking man-bear replies. “We’re a biker organization and we help abused kids, man.” The G.O.C. sounds a lot more compelling than Johnny Knoxville in the dairy aisle drinking a bottle of chocolate milk he hasn’t paid for.
There’s a problem with the spectacle of a Hollywood zillionaire coming down from the mountain trying to get a rise out of working-class America. The Jackass boys picked an amazingly good-humored and tolerant country. About the worst they can get out of people is restrained gasps. Nobody orders Knoxville whipped with a flame-broiled piece of barbed wire. Only once or twice does he even get yelled at.
Johnny needs to raise the stakes a little. How about some Jackassery in a place notable for its lack of a sense of humor, like Saudia Arabia? Sudden-onset diarrhea on a Koran in a public square in downtown Riyadh: Now that would be inappropriate. It might even be edgy.