No stars or 4 stars? Maybe both for 'Jackass 3D'

The excruciating, nauseating, hilarious and horrifying "Jackass 3-D" will have the viewer confronting a question not ordinarily posed by a major motion picture: Can I laugh and throw up at the same time? One of the cameramen does (we see him do it, several times), but he's a professional, as are the rest of masochistic pseudo-morons, led by the charismatic Johnny Knoxville, in this latest version of the MTV-spawned series of stunt comedies.

A "Jackass" film - never mind one in 3-D - is immune to the movie laws of God and/or man, so there are no stars at the top of this review. The movie could just as easily get four stars or it could get none. But nothing in between makes sense.

Pain is the currency of the "Jackass" films - the participants are launched into space, bitten by scorpions, T-balled in the groin, have footballs kicked into their faces by NFL players, undergo hair removal by Super Glue and are bungeed into the air while sitting in a Port-o-San that hasn't been emptied since the Clinton administration (and these are the stunts that are printable). The viewer recoils, or embraces it all. And either way, you're forced to decide whether pain equals entertainment, a concept older than Buster Keaton. "Jackass 3D" is simply slapstick without the story line, with the addition of stun guns and cattle prods.

Some of "Jackass 3D," which would be just as funny in 2-D, is simply politically incorrect comedy: In one sequence, a love triangle among three dwarves becomes a dwarf bar fight broken up by dwarf police, with the injured attended by dwarf EMTs. "Jackass" is always pushing buttons, but the glee with which it's done and the weird camaraderie among the self-abusing participants - a perverse band of brothers in a weird war against their own physical limitations - gives the film a dimension that's quite memorable, and very unnerving.