If you’re familiar with the 21 Jump Street TV show from the 80s, then you know that this is a story about a group of young police recruits, fresh out of the academy, who are sent into high schools to pose as students, bust up underage crime rings, and send everyone to juvie. If you’re not familiar with the TV show, don’t worry, because this new big screen version of the property doesn’t have much to do with it other than sharing a basic concept. Actually, this is a much more broadly comedic interpretation of the material that’s less a legitimate story being told and more an excuse for stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum to goof around.
Hill is playing a character named Schmidt, and Tatum one named Jenko. Back when they were in high school together they didn’t get along very well, because Jenko was the overly-muscled, lantern-jawed, big man on campus, and Schmidt was a chubby dork trying to cultivate an ill-advised Eminem lookalike persona. That’s not the end of their journey though. Things change several years later when they find themselves in the same class at police academy. Suddenly Jenko needs Schmidt to get him through all of the procedural quizzes, Schmidt needs Jenko to motivate him through the fitness tests, and the epic friendship of a lifetime is born.
The best thing about 21 Jump Street is how quickly it moves. All of this setup is done in about the first ten minutes. In addition to giving us a movie that doesn’t drag, it shows what a strong ad campaign this one had as well. By the end of the first ten minutes you’ve gotten through pretty much all of the clips they used for the trailer, and you’re left with a sense that you don’t know what’s going to come next, and that everything you see is going to be fresh. I love it when that happens. There’s nothing worse than an ad campaign that tells a film’s entire story or that gives away all of its best jokes.
The worst thing about 21 Jump Street is that everything that happens over the course of the film fails to congeal into a satisfying whole. Half of this movie is a senseless series of wacky situations and comedic riffs, something resembling Will Farrell and John C. Reilly’s best work together, and the other half consists of a bunch of storytelling commitments. There’s the infiltration of the drug ring, an escalating series of altercations with a violent biker gang, and the trials and tribulations of going back to high school. That’s a lot of plot stuff that needs to be tied up and tied together, and 21 Jump Street can never seem to decide if it’s committed to the task, or if it would rather let all of that story stuff fall by the wayside in favor of just making goofy jokes.
The good news is that most of the goofy jokes are actually funny. Perhaps the biggest surprise, as far as that’s concerned, is that a lot of the bigger laughs come from Tatum. It’s been clear for quite a while that Hill is great when he’s working in comedy, but Tatum has been such a charisma-free lump of an actor in everything I’ve seen him in that the revelation of him having a good sense of comedic timing and a willingness to commit to any premise, no matter how goofy, came as something of a shock. I sincerely hope that he just keeps being funny in his future roles and never, ever tries to work in drama again.
On the opposite side of that spectrum, Hill handles most of the dramatic work here. And while that doesn’t come as much of a shock after his performances in things like Moneyball, it makes for something of a role reversal between the principal actors that played nicely into a similar role reversal being experienced by their characters. You see, once the now undercover officers go back to high school, they find out that things have changed. These days kids are living in an Internet connected world where snarky humor and a concern for global issues rules the day. The times of meatheads getting praised for driving muscle cars and picking on those who are different from them are over, and for the first time ever, Schmidt finds himself as part of the popular crew and Jenko as one of the outcasts.
This wrinkle in the status quo not only works nicely to introduce some character elements into what could have been a procedural police tale, but it also allows the screenwriters to make a number of clever observations about how weird and different youth culture can look even to those less than a decade removed from it. What doesn’t so much work is that a large part of what Hill’s character is struggling with concerns whether or not he will be able to woo an underage girl (Brie Larson) that he’s smitten with. Sure it’s kind of funny watching a grown man being so worried about winning the approval of teenage kids, but it’s also really creepy, and it makes it pretty hard to root for Schmidt throughout the film. And that’s not the only place where jokes get in the way of the storytelling either.
Even the police plot and the action scenes are completely inundated with a constant stream of gags. All of the exposition of what the mission they’re on entails and how their progress is going is given to us by a screaming, black police captain (Ice Cube) who makes Meta references to the fact that he’s a screaming, black police captain. Presenting the whole thing as a joke kind of removes the stakes from the mission. And there are chase scenes that seem to exist for little reason other than to make reoccurring jokes about movie explosions. They’re kind of funny, but if you’re going to spend all of this time and money making elaborate chase sequences, you’d think that you’d want them to include some thrills and not just a few easy laughs. The dedication to jokes even bogs down the high school subplot. Ellie Kemper plays Jenko’s unhinged Chemistry teacher, a woman who’s more than a little taken aback by how sexy she finds the new kid in her class. Kemper is hilarious, and watching her manic reactions to Tatum’s chiseled masculinity provides a good number of giggles, but she receives so much screen time that you get the impression she’s going to be important to the story in some way; and then she just isn’t. It read like a clumsy attempt at shoe-horning another hot comedic actor into the movie, and a more disciplined filmmaker would have probably left this stuff on the editing room floor. But a more serious screenplay might have made the teacher/student romantic subplot a meatier one that actually meant something. Wouldn’t that have made a more effective focus than following Hill’s character as he tries to commit statutory rape?
It’s hard to say whether this movie would have been improved with a more serious approach. Most of its charms stem from the fact that it’s so gleefully dumb, and it would be a completely different movie if it were less so. But, in the end, I just don’t think it was funny enough to warrant so much wackiness. 21 Jump Street is amusing all of the way through; pretty much at every moment I was smiling to myself, or maybe lightly chuckling. But I didn’t get any of the real big belly laughs that you expect from a movie that’s this out there. As is, this movie is pleasant enough to watch without regrets, but it’s not a complete success. It needed to either be a bit funnier or work a lot better as a legit police drama in order to get over that hump. And seeing as making something funnier is easier said than done, I probably would have tried to add more weight to the dramatic moments if I was put in the filmmakers’ shoes. Even if I did already say that I never want Channing Tatum to try to act serious ever again.
