I never watched the ’80s television show that launched Johnny Depp’s career and inspired this feature film adaptation into being, but it’s clearly aware of what it is and makes no attempt to hide the fact it’s attempting to make money off a one-time popular television program. So, yes, 21 Jump Street is entirely self-aware and inside this self awareness there are plenty of laughs and a solid bit of camaraderie, but the final moments take away from an otherwise solid film as it devolves into unnecessary melodrama, which is to say this is a decent, if flawed, comedy.
Teen comedies, the buddy cop genre and even, to a lesser degree, the body-switch storyline come together as we are first introduced to Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as Schimdt and Jenko respectively. Introductions take place five years in the past when Schmidt was an Eminem wannabe high school loser and Jenko was the class jock. Jenko picks on Schmidt because he’s smart and Schmidt feels inferior because he’s picked on. We aren’t breaking new ground here.
Flash forward five years and they find themselves entering the police academy together where their high school differences are used to their advantage and a friendship is born. However, being a police officer isn’t everything they thought it would be as they hit the beat as a pair of bicycle cops who’d rather be living the Bad Boys life than fetching Frisbees out of trees at the park.
Opportunity comes knocking, in a roundabout way, as they are punished for improperly reading a drug dealer his Miranda rights and are assigned undercover duty as brothers at a local high school where a new drug is being passed around and they need to track down the supplier.
So it’s off to school they go, but school isn’t how they remember it. This time around Schmidt is the cool guy and Jenko the outcast — See Jenko, it’s not cool when people are mean to you is it? This is actually the one area of the film they could have done without, at least in terms of taking the melodrama to such silly levels where a moral lesson needs to be learned. This is an R-rated teen comedy and all attempts to be something more feel forced and unnecessary. However, when it works, it works from a slap down aimed at “Glee” and a fantastic science lesson from Tatum making for the funniest moment the film has to offer.
Jonah Hill’s talents as a funny guy aren’t revelatory, he’s been making his laugh for a few years now with the likes of Superbad and Get Him to the Greek, but Tatum is certainly beginning to find his groove. Yes, the ladies love him in films such as The Vow and anything else the one-time male stripper confesses his love in, but after being the only good thing in last year’s otherwise awful The Dilemma, maybe Tatum’s talents are best suited for comedy.
Tatum’s got something of a “dumb jock” ability that he can’t seem to shake and I’ve never found it to work all that well unless he’s playing some sort of street tough (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints), a soldier (Stop-Loss) or as a bit-part assassin (Haywire). Any time he’s asked to emote as if he were a real human being it feels off, but inside comedy I think he shakes that desire to “act” and becomes a little more of himself and it works. Hopefully he can loosen up a bit in his dramatic roles and achieve the same level of connectivity.
Otherwise, Ice Cube gets a few laughs as the duo’s hard-nosed sergeant, Rob Riggle plays a tightly wound gym teacher who also finds his head turned into an ice cream cone as the two trip out on drugs and watching Dave Franco, as the high school’s drug dealer, it is impossible not to think of his older brother in every scene he’s in as he carries off the same cocky swagger and crooked smile.
For all its ups and downs, 21 Jump Street is fun, but it’s hard not to be disappointed once it falls into the melodramatic trap so many other films fall into. To me it shows a lack of confidence in the source material in that the writers felt they needed something more than just the comedy. Then again the entire ending lacked freshness all the way up to the final gunshot, which takes to territory already explored by “South Park” and even as recently as Scream 4. Oh well, in this day and age it’s hard to be entirely unique, and for the most part 21 Jump Street satisfies.
