Review: ’22 Jump Street’ (SPOILERS)
One thing that 2014 is sure to be remembered for is the year the film world began paying attention to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. The directing team snuck up on us earlier this year with The Lego Movie, a genuine delight in which everything is awesome. Now, not even half a year later, they hit us with 22 Jump Street.
The sequel to the 21 Jump Street revitalization that they also handled, 22 is a very rare comedy successor that matches the laughs and quality. The key? Not fixing what isn’t broken.
Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) try their hand at an out of school assignment to bust and apprehend a drug lord (Peter Stormare), but fail miserably. Their superior (Nick Offerman) decides to just let them do what they succeeded at the last time and transfers them back to Captain Dickson (Ice Cube). Given their exact same undercover identities, they are sent to a college to investigate the death of a student in relation to drug dealing.
Unlike the first however, the campus social environment is like that of their initial high school experiences. That is to say, Jenko easily falls in with the jocks and frat boys, while Schmidt finds an in with the beat poetry scene. This ends up fitting for the case, as Jenko’s crowd involves suspects while Schmidt gets close to a friend (Amber Stevens) of the victim.
The central conceit again is the meta awareness, being as much a commentary on making a sequel to 21 Jump Street as it is just that. Offerman’s lines are just about interchangeable with what a studio executive might say (he even uses the term “reboot”). And the introductory sequence works because it doesn’t work. For example, Schmidt’s undercover identity as a Hispanic caricature is so cringe-inducing it’s practically minstrel. But of course they know this full well, the whole point being for the audience to want this mission to end so they can go back to doing what they do best.
Plenty of gut-busting jokes and comedic skills abound. Tatum and Hill prove once more what a great team they make. Ice Cube is given more to do in this installment and is a standout. But it’s Jillian Bell as the roommate of Stevens that ends up stealing the picture. Taking an instant suspicion of Schmidt, she is delightfully acerbic and the cutting barbs exchanged are some of the best material in the film.
But the similarity to the first means that the same issue hangs over this one: the fact that it’s a comedy at all in the first place. The 21 Jump Street TV show was serious and gritty; a proper film adaptation would be akin to something like The Substitute. What the makers were going for is certainly done well, but was this really the best choice of material to have done it with?
Lord and Miller have got all eyes on them now, and if they were to move on and leave Jump Street behind, 22 is a very high note to go out on. And given the film’s (hilarious) coda, it would be best to let it end here.
