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Jackass Number Two heralds the beginning of a new movement, an artistic rebellion against the bourgeois interests who promote war over peace, carnage over culture, and corporate profits over living wages. Director Jeff Tremaine has crafted a watershed work that art historians will someday look back on as the genesis of Twenty-First Century Neo-Dadaism.

Just as the original Dada movement protested the barbarism of World War I, Jackass Number Two takes to task the intellectual rigidity that causes nations to march once again into battle. The film opens with the cast members being chased by a large group of bulls. The charging animals clearly represent our bull-headed politicians who systematically demoralize and then destroy the aspirations of the common man. The scene ends with several bulls pushing Johnny Knoxville through a window, but not before he utters his signature line, “Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville. Welcome to Jackass!” The unspoken subtext of that scene is, “Welcome to a world where military incompetence and arrogance stampede over logic and reason.”

In a later scene, Steve-O puts on an airtight helmet with the only ventilation coming from a tube that Preston Lacy will fart into. When Lacy ends up defecating into the tube, Steve-O vomits into the helmet. The unexpected confluence of barf and fecal matter cleverly illuminates the key question posed by Dadists, “Is our art nonsense, or is it the essence of our age that is nonsense?”

The poignant social barbs arrive rapid-fire, and it's easy to miss the meaning of some on first viewing. The scene, for example, where Chris Pontius drinks horse semen can confuse. Is the consumption of equine ejaculate a metaphor for the so-called news that the media giants expect us to swallow each day, or is this a dig at our nation's galloping obsession with Paris Hilton? Of course, the ambiguity may be intentional, as Dadaism often strives to make interpretation entirely dependant on the viewer.

Jackass Number Two unlocks the shackles that that the ruling elite have clamped onto modern art. By extension, the film works to liberate all thought, prompting a wholesale questioning of the insanity of institutionalized homicide, unending poverty, and the unchecked trampling of human rights. A key scene finds Johnny Knoxville entering the pen of an enraged yak and blindfolding himself. The charging yak upends Knoxville, who lands roughly before scurrying to safety. Jackass Number Two is a clarion call to men of reason everywhere to remove their blindfolds and confront the yaks who yoke in the yearning aspirations of mankind.

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