The Guilty Pleasure That's Back for More: A Review of 22 Jump Street

written by Michael Bacall and Oren Uziel
directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

In 2012, the buddy cop comedy that was very loosely adapted from a popular 1980s police procedural drama called 21 Jump Street took me almost completely by surprise. It was utterly idiotic, and yet so funny in its envelope-pushing crude humor that it was downright intoxicating at some points.

Hollywood being Hollywood, two years later, Sony Pictures and MGM have brought the gang back together for a sequel to that surprisingly lucrative enterprise, this time titled 22 Jump Street.

At the end of the last movie, undercover police officers Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) busted a drug running operation that had been set up in a high school by a teacher and a student. This time around, the film starts with them performing more "conventional" police work (at least, as far as movie police work goes) and failing spectacularly at collaring a notorious smuggler known only as "the Ghost" (Peter Stormare). As a result, they are put back on the Jump Street program, which has, this time moved across the street from the old Korean Church to a Vietnamese Church (hence the change in title). They have more money, but the same mission: to bust up a drug operation that has set up in a local college. This time around, there is no mix-up in their identities, and as a result Jenko (a.k.a. Brad) ends up impressing the local athletic set, among whom may or may not be the pusher, while Schmidt (a.k.a. Doug) starts schmoozing among the "artistic" types with whom the deceased victim whose death sparked the investigation spent much of her time. As in the last film, their different paths pull them apart from each other, but in the end, they will need each other to solve the case.

  Anyone looking for meaningful reflections on the human condition or even mind-blowing displays of computer-generated imagery will be better off saving their money, but people looking for two hours chock-full of gay double entendres, mindless slapstick humor, more metafiction than one can keep track of, and a whole lot of belly laughs, will get exactly what they're looking for in this film, if not even more.

This movie really sings to someone like me, who grew up with the low-budget screwball comedies of the 80s and early 90s. The movie is loaded to the gills with that brand of comedy, but with a distinctly 21st century sensibility. Last time around, the narrative twist was having Tatum's macho Jenko paired up with the nerds by mistake, and the "bromance" angle was only touched on tangentially for a few jokes. This time around, though, it's at the heart of the film, and the filmmakers milk the jokes and double entendres for just about everything they're worth. Also, the various "meta" references that range from the tradition of beefing up the budget of sequels, to Tatum's 2013 box-office dud White House Down, are spot-on. As in the last film, there are a couple of rocking cameos here too, none of which I will spoil, though the less perceptive might want to see if they can recognize the guy who plays Vietnamese Jesus during Jenko's drug trip.

One of my quibbles with this movie was the fact that Hill looked absolutely awful. There's a running joke throughout the film about how old he looks, just as there was in the last movie, only this time they hit the nail right on the head. Either Hill ages unnaturally fast, or he'd better lay off the drugs. Tatum, as before, looks like he's in great shape, and in fact, managed to look even more credible as a college student than Kurt Russell's 27-year-old son Wyatt, who plays the football god that becomes Jenko's BFF throughout the film, much to Schmidt's annoyance. The good news, though, is that Hill's and Tatum's chemistry from the first film is still very much intact.  There's something interesting about how Hill is able to portray compelling onscreen odd-couple pairings with heartthrobs; he was able to achieve similar comedic synergy with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, though not quite on the level of his rapport with Tatum.

 The end credits, which stretch on quite a bit, tend to make an emphatic statement on how the production team feels about making yet another sequel to this film (and in fact, many of them have declared they won't) but considering how this film looks like it will end up making even more money than its predecessor, and the dearth of Sony's bankable franchises (with even their formerly bulletproof Spider-Man series showing signs of serious wear and tear earlier this year) I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with an excuse for Hill and Tatum to strap on their guns at least one more time. If they do, though, they're going to need CGI to keep Hill from looking at least five years too old.

8.5/10

Dreamworks' Most Mature Movie to Date: A Review of How to Train Your Dragon 2

written and directed by Dean DeBlois

The first How to Train Your Dragon movie back in 2010 wasn't quite groundbreaking, what with various plot devices borrowed from other movies from coming-of-age awkwardness to the hero learning the truth about his supposed enemy that has been featured in various movies like Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai and Avatar, but it was definitely entertaining in a way that few animated movies before it had ever been. It was, to my mind as well as to those of many viewers and critics, among Dreamworks Animation Studios' best efforts, and it even compares well to some of the better movies of the studio that set the gold standard in computer-generated animated feature films, Pixar.  That film had a great deal of heart, arguably more than anything that Pixar has produced after Toy Story 3.

What surprised me about this year's sequel, simply titled How to Train Your Dragon 2, was not that it was as good as, if not even slightly better than the first movie, but that the filmmakers were willing to have their story take a slightly dark, if not entirely unpredictable turn this time around.

Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the hero of the first film, is grown up now and having the time of his life with his pet dragon Toothless; thanks to his flying companion his world has expanded far beyond the boundaries of his small island of Berk, the inhabitants of which have come to embrace the dragons they feared and hated in the last movie, including Hiccup's own father and the village Chief, Stoick (Gerard Butler). Stoick, who is getting on in years, wants Hiccup to succeed him as the chief of Berk, much to Hiccup's displeasure. While off exploring (and escaping his father), Hiccup makes a startling, life-changing discovery that changes everything he thought he knew about his past, and not a moment too soon, for looming on the horizon is a threat that could spell big trouble for Berk, it inhabitants, and its dragons. Berk's dragon riders Hiccup, Astrid (America Ferrara), Snotlout (Jonah Hill), Fishlegs (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and twins Ruffnut (Kristen Wiig) and Tuffnut (T.J. Miller), and their dragons will need every ounce of skill they have to save their community from a menace that is unlike anything they've ever faced before.

Without wading into spoiler territory, I have to say that this film quite easily has the most heart of any Dreamworks movie since Kung Fu Panda, which is possibly down to the fact that the two films share, to a small extent, the theme of unlikely heroes rising to the occasion. This film actually tackles pretty heady themes like responsibility, and reconciling one's desires with one's duty, and while, again, they aren't exactly reinventing the wheel, writer/director Dean DeBlois and his cast and crew manage to turn in a story that is genuine and heartfelt, so much so that when things take a turn for the tragic late in the film, the impact is quite meaningful. Some reviewers have declared this film to The Empire Strikes Back, obviously for its darker tone in relation to the lighter-than-air feel of the first film, and in that sense at least, the movie is groundbreaking in its willingness to leave what is likely its audience's comfort zone to tell a compelling story.

The animation and rendering are, as they were before, simply astonishing, and it was gratifying to see that, with the expansion of Hiccup's world, several new dragon designs were also introduced. I do admit, however, to being vaguely disappointed by the design of one very important new dragon; apart from its size, it simply doesn't come off as imposing as it should be. Still, this didn't detract all that much from the overall narrative effectiveness.

I am happy to report that there's plenty to like here for the young and the young at heart.

8.5/10