'21 Jump Street'

By Bob Garver

“21 Jump Street” is a com­bi­na­tion of three gen­res that have been done to death lately: the Bum­bling Cop Movie, the Big Screen Ver­sion of an Old TV Show, and the Foul-Mouthed Sex and Drug Com­edy. Like most Bum­bling Cop Movies, there are sev­eral scenes where the main char­ac­ters expect some­thing cool to hap­pen like it would in a movie, and the results are less than spec­tac­u­lar. This device was clever once, now it’s tired. Like most Big Screen Ver­sions of Old TV Shows, the char­ac­ters make tongue-in-cheek com­ments about how the lame­ness of movies based on TV shows. These com­ments aren’t half as clever and are twice as tired as the movie thinks they are. Like most Foul-Mouthed Sex and Drug Come­dies, there’s a lot of foul lan­guage and sex and drug humor. Sorry to not elab­o­rate, but I have to spare the dirt­ier details. In this case the humor is at least some­what clever and not quite as tired, so it’s here where the film finds the most success.

Schmidt (Jonah Hill) is an awk­ward egghead who was mis­er­able in high school. Jenko (Chan­ning Tatum) is a dumb beef­cake who was pop­u­lar in high school but whose life has gone nowhere since. After seven years, both meet up again as they train to become police offi­cers. They help each other to qual­ify, but nei­ther is mature enough to serve prop­erly. For­tu­nately, there is an under­cover pro­gram that needs imma­ture offi­cers. Their cap­tain (a scene-stealing Ice Cube) sends them to take down a drug ring in a place that got the bet­ter of both of them, high school.

There’s a run­ning gag through­out the film that Jenko and Schmidt look like they’re too old to be high school­ers. Actu­ally, the actors are too old even for the char­ac­ters they’re play­ing. Hill is 29, Tatum is 32. The char­ac­ters are sup­posed to be 25 and I just don’t buy it. The film fur­ther pol­lutes its own time­line by think­ing that high school­ers in 2005 would be obsessed with Eminem and “The Real Slim Shady”. That song came out in 2000, five years later it was a fossil.

The film doesn’t have much orig­i­nal to say as a cop movie, buddy movie, or high school movie. I will con­cede that it does do some­thing inter­est­ing as a TV adap­ta­tion when we find out late in the film that it is actu­ally a sequel to the TV series and not a remake. And yes, the film has a cameo from THAT star of the orig­i­nal series. To that point I will add that before the film there is a trailer for the actor’s next film, another Big Screen Ver­sion of an Old TV Show in “Dark Shad­ows”. The film looks hor­ri­ble and the trailer received boos and insults from the crowd at the screen­ing I attended.

“21 Jump Street” gets a pass from me because of its humor, an imma­ture brand that I nonethe­less found pretty funny. As embar­rassed as I am to admit it, my favorite parts of the film involved drug trips, the best gag being Jenko’s per­for­mance in a sci­ence class fol­low­ing intake. But there are mounds of other R-rated come­dies I can rec­om­mend, includ­ing 2007’s “Super­bad” which is a much bet­ter movie where Jonah Hill also plays a high schooler. Then again, “Super­bad” isn’t play­ing at the the­ater this week­end. There are worse ways to spend two hours than with a group of friends and a rowdy crowd watch­ing a raunchy com­edy like this and laugh­ing at its idiocy together.

Two Stars out of Five.

“21 Jump Street” is rated R for crude and sex­ual con­tent, per­va­sive lan­guage, drug mate­r­ial, teen drink­ing, and some vio­lence. Its run­ning time is 109 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Mar 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.