21 JUMP STREET Review

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When I first heard they were remaking the classic show 21 Jump Street that jump-started Johnny Depp’s career, my knee jerk reaction was a mix of disappointment and slight surprise.  21 Jump Street is part of a slew and school of what seems to be a recurring fad in Hollywood of chopping up, remixing, redoing, and remaking older shows, books, movies, cartoons, comic strips, or anything that our generation is too young to know about or our parents’ generation is too lazy to remember.

Because I fall under the category of the generation who is too young to know about the original show (not an excuse, just too busy catching up on Mad Men) I can’t compare the 1987 show to the 2012 movie, but that does afford me the opportunity to look at the Jonah Hill-Channing Tatum vehicle of explosiveness objectively.

Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are brothers-in-arms buddy cops, playing on the slightly homoerotic undertones that have swept theaters since the outburst of Superbad.  Using Tatum’s masculinity and Hill’s nerdish look as a backdrop, the film plays on their physical attributes as characteristics of their impotence at being police officers.  When they make their first arrest and forget to read the Miranda rights to their perp, they are assigned to a revived undercover operation by Deputy Chief Hardy, played with the perfect combination of meta and sarcasm by Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman.  Offerman’s speech to Hill and Tatum is one of the most self-aware speeches inadvertently about remakes that I’ve heard in the post-remake-everything-ever-age and delivered dripping with the meta-juice that has been overtaking Hollywood since Community made it cool to poke fun at yourself.

After being assigned to the apropos 21 Jump Street, Schmidt and Jenko are informed that they have to infiltrate the dealers and find the suppliers by the stereotypical angry black cop played with glaring awareness by Ice Cube.  Breaking back into high school is a tad bit more difficult than it seems, especially when the popular kids are full of eco-friendly, anti-fascist cool kids led by James Franco’s little brother Dave Franco.  Young Franco demonstrates that he can definitely act but from this script he has not shown that he qualifies for a 127 Hours project…yet.  Give him time and I’m sure we’ll see him breakthrough and prove that acting is, in fact, hereditary.

Where 21 Jump Street succeeds rather than fails is as the movie progresses, it gets to just the right amount of ridiculousness and doesn’t forget what it is doing.  There is no mask being pulled over the audience’s face, nothing that would let us forget that we are watching something that is very much aware of the line that they are crossing and that they have no problem crossing it.  The directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, have demonstrated that they can handle moderately big name actors, highly effected explosions and car chases, and humor to a level just above their previous Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.  However, as their writing credits show they did contribute to the god awful Extreme Movie, so I wouldn’t be surprised if their names started to be attached to another slew of less than mediocre entertainment.  All in all, 21 Jump Street succeeded in containing their laughs to the plot instead of relying on heavy pop culture references but I don’t think this will be something that the kids will be referencing for longer than 6 months after they see it.