What to watch: The 3 best movies to stream this weekend from 'Jackass Forever' to 'Uncharted'

Wondering what to watch this weekend? As the summer rolls on, this week brings with it a whole host of action-packed movies to in contrast to the slow down of blockbusters landing in cinemas at the moment.

At the front of the pack is the fourth film in the venerated Jackass series — Jackass Forever — which sees the group of gleefully anarchic pranksters reunite 10 years after their last large scale slapstick fest, Jackass 3D. (Fans who want to see even more: there’s also Jackass 4.5 on Netflix following in the tradition of the crew releasing outtakes as their own medium-length film.)

At the same time, and perhaps with similar daredevil blood in its veins, Kathryn Bigelow’s magnum opus Point Break is available on iPlayer, a must-see shot of adrenaline for anyone who loves movies about bank robbers, surfers, Keanu Reeves or all three of the above.

Read more: Everything new on Sky in August

Meanwhile, Tom Holland’s first big post-Spider-Man action adventure Uncharted lands on Netflix.

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Jackass Forever (2022) - Paramount+ (pick of the week)

There’s no denying that Jackass Forever eases off the throttle slightly compared to its predecessors, but Johnny Knoxville and his cohort of lifelong friends do their utmost to prove that they can do the same stunts they always have, if not, a more extreme version of them. The end credits sequence puts up side-by-side, split-screen shots of classic stunts with their updated descendants to make sure we know that they’re not half-arsing Jackass.

Read more: Everything new on Paramount+ in August

To mitigate the effects of a slightly smaller roster and give the veteran crew a shot in the arm, some new blood is introduced, such as one-time Odd Future member Jasper, who is a great addition who feels so at home that it’s like he’s always been there. Better still, he brings the film’s highlight with him: his own father, Dark Shark, whose reactions to the crews pranks are as endearing as they are hilarious.

As for the pranks themselves, they’re as childish, gross and entertaining as ever, performed with only more destructive finesse since their MTV golden days. Ever since Chaplin and Keaton it’s been funny to watch people fall down and Jackass is arguably one of the purest modern distillations of such slapstick. There are Rube Goldberg-esque setups that becomes more and more ridiculous, like a ‘haunted house’ gag that has some of the crew scurrying around a blacked out room and finding more and more absurd obstacles made to bonk them in the head as they try and escape.

It’s silly, yes — but smart about its silliness.

Also new on Paramount+: Secret Headquarters (2022)

Uncharted (2022) - Netflix

One wonders why an Uncharted movie even exists. The blockbuster video games from PlayStation studio Naughty Dog thrive on inventing the feeling of playing through an interactive film, lifting from Indiana Jones in various, on-rail set-pieces. If 'playable Indiana Jones' is the whole appeal of the franchise, then why make the passive version of that?

Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer doesn’t make an extremely strong case for this, perhaps done no favours by the initial miscasting of Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg as the young treasure hunter Nathan Drake and his mentor Victor “Sully” Sullivan respectively.

Watch: Antonio Banderas talks to Yahoo about Uncharted

Folding in a number of plotlines and imagery from across the series — the backstory of Uncharted 3 and retcon of Uncharted 4 included — it follows a young, street-smart version of Nathan as he searches pursuit of a fabled treasure of Sir Francis Drake’s Magellan expedition, calling it 'the greatest treasure never found', while also tracking clues that may lead to his long-lost brother Sam.

Without the prior investment of the games, it’s likely a pretty okay time, sitting in the same realm as the recent Tomb Raider as a perfectly passable action adventure in its own right, though Holland brings far less personality or raw physicality to this than Vikander did with Lara Croft. Wahlberg shouldn’t be there at all, lacking the gruff charisma of his videogame counterpart (fun fact: he was originally due to play Nathan Drake, but aged out of the role due to the film's time in development hell).

Read more: Everything new on Netflix in August

But with Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle picking up the slack, it keeps a light pace and has some inventive set pieces, enough that anyone craving a treasure hunt adventure could do much worse.

Also new on Netflix: Look Both Ways (2022), Royalteen (2022)

Point Break (1991) - BBC iPlayer

Kathryn Bigelow’s surfer cops and criminals opus Point Break should be a priority for anyone who hasn’t watched it yet.

A young and incredibly handsome Keanu Reeves plays the ludicrously-named Johnny Utah, a hotshot FBI agent who is sent after a daredevil crew of bank robbers who call themselves The Ex-Presidents. Their MO is committing their crimes while wearing masks of Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson.

The twist is that the agency think they might also be a group of surfers, and so Utah ingratiates himself with them and their charismatic leader Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). The resulting homoeroticism is just one part of why Point Break is so great, perhaps the zenith of Bigelow’s incredibly hot-blooded earlier films shot with both romance and realism, before the frustrations of her later collaborations with Mark Boal.

Read more: Everything new on Disney+ in August

Point Break is an emphatic delight, full of heated one-liners and exhilarating momentum, even conjuring a feeling of romance and spirituality in its characters’ quests for freedom.

Also on iPlayer: Greta (2018), The Notebook (2004)