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