Action Point: Tim Kirkby

Traditional stunt work, much like traditional special effects, is quickly becoming a thing of Hollywood’s past. Not that there isn’t a demand for stunt performers in modern American blockbusters, but the days of stunts uncluttered by computer animation, obnoxious editing, and shaky-cam hysterics seem bygone and forgotten. Now Melissa McCartney and Kevin James can hardly make a pratfall in a trailer without a CGI assist, nor can a fistfight between superheroes go uninterrupted without a camera zooming around them like a hyperactive Peregrine falcon. (I’ll always consider the Russo Brothers’ decision to mince the elevator fight scene in Captain America: Winter Soldier [2014] into a thousand micro-edited close-ups instead of a single static long-take one of the most tragic creative miscalculations of 2010s cinema.) All of this is what makes the stunt-work in Tim Kirkby’s Action Point so refreshing—when we see Johnny Knoxville fall two stories out of a tree, bounce off an aluminum ceiling, and smash into the ground next to a pissed off brown bear, we know it actually happened. Likewise when we watch him grab a porcupine by the tail, go flying off an alpine slide, or get trebucheted into the side of a barn, we know that we’re watching undoctored footage of America’s great idiot savant of practical stunt-work. The problem is that Action Point made the tragic mistake of trying to tell an actual story with actual characters and actual emotions, breaking apart the action scenes into islands scattered amidst a sea of boring, predictable tedium.

Knoxville plays D.C., the owner of the eponymous money pit theme park in some nondescript part of 70s California populated solely by teenagers and alcoholic layabouts. In the course of the film he reconnects with his estranged daughter Boogie (Eleanor Worthington Cox), fights off the encroachment of a rival theme park, sticks it to The Man trying to shut them down and buy them out, and learns to be a respectable father. Whatever. Every story beat is predictable, right down to D.C. and his brother Benny (fellow Jackass alumni Chris Pontius) getting super nervous and weirded out by the revelation that Boogie is a teenager with periods and a purse full of tampons. Action Point could have been a brilliant Jackass reunion. Consider this: Knoxville and his buddies spend 90 minutes fixing up a dilapidated theme park, devoting 5-10 minutes to sequences where they get into all kinds of hilarious hijinks trying to restore different attractions. And if properly handled the actual story could have been genuinely poignant: there’s an underlying wistfulness throughout, a kind of realization by Knoxville & Co. that it isn’t the early 2000s anymore and there isn’t really a place for their weaponized puerility in today’s culture. Action Point NEEDS to close down, and not because of buzzkill lawyers and nanny state politicians, but because Action Point is in itself an idea retarding the mental and emotional growth of its owners and customers. Instead we have this monumental disappointment. And the final insult? All the best stunts in the film were already shown in the trailer.

Rating: 4/10