Short Round: 22 Jump Street (2014) ***/*****
Sequels are hard enough to make already, but when you task yourself with making a comedy sequel, then you’ve really got a challenge on your hands. A joke, if good, is funny the first time you hear it, but the second time? Infinitely less so. So how does one make a sequel that has enough to do with an original comedy for consumers to recognize it as being more of what they enjoyed the first time, but that keeps things fresh enough that it doesn’t feel like they’re being re-told the same joke? For directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie) and the bevy of screenwriters they’ve employed here, the answer seems to be to make a 22 Jump Street that’s not only very aware that it exists solely because 21 Jump Street was a financial success, but that also mines all of the usual pandering and repetition comedy sequels abuse for Meta comedy.
How does it fare? Eh. Not amazingly well, honestly. The Meta humor regarding the nature of comedy sequels and how they’re generally given the thankless task of trotting out the same old shit for another go-around of cynical money-making is good for a few chuckles, but it’s not funny enough to forgive the fact that 22 Jump Street is still a comedy sequel that’s trotting out all of the same old shit for another go-around of cynical money-making. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have strong comedic chemistry, to be sure, but they were already so old in the first film that a few self-aware jokes had to be made about how old they looked there, and in this sequel the problem is so bad that you basically have to re-address how they look nothing like college freshman every time a new character appears. Exposition is the death of comedy, so making two movies about a couple of adult cops who need to go undercover as students to break up a drug ring is certainly pushing your luck. 22 Jump Street has a handful of laughs, but not enough to make up for what a pointless retread it is. If Hill and Tatum work so well together, why not reunite them to work on another original script and not a silly sequel? It worked the first time.
To be fair, 21 Jump Street wasn’t a movie that worked all that well for me the first time around either, but it’s grown in my esteem over time because it’s consistently funny and it’s good for casual re-watching, so it’s possible that 22 Jump Street could achieve the same feat over time. It is pretty funny, after all. The work Jillian Bell does is good enough alone to mean that everyone should check the movie out for themselves. She’s playing a small, supporting role, but every time she opens her mouth to say anything she gets a big laugh. Plus, Hill and Tatum really do have an easy chemistry that allows them to seamlessly pass off who’s playing the comic relief and who’s being the straight man in any given situation. When you get down to the nitty gritty though, a handful of laughs are likely not enough to apologize for a movie that’s so stupid in its conception that it has to keep re-apologizing for itself as it goes on. There’s just not much going on in here that’s going to stick with anyone for more than ten minutes after they’re done watching it. At the very least though, it’s inspired me to go back to me 21 Jump Street review and bump up its rating a notch. It’s easy to forget just how bad that movie could have turned out in other hands.
