Ready to jump

Having grown up watching Johnny Depp as undercover Officer Tom Hanson on TV, I was a bit uncomfortable with the idea of remaking 21 Jump Street as a movie. Turns out I had no reason to worry, because the films really are not remakes of the show at all. Instead, they could be considered homages—nods to the narc-cop genre wrapped in ridiculous, sometimes silly humor.

Take, for instance, the show’s somewhat absurd premise of cops in their mid-20s infiltrating high schools week after week impersonating teenagers. Their shop is a converted church, their budget is next to nada … you get the picture. There’s a lot to poke fun at here, and while fans of the show might get more of the references, the beauty of these films is that “getting it” is really just a bonus, a very small part of the fun.

For this second installment, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill return as Officers Jenko and Schmidt, respectively. The film—called 22 Jump Street because of an actual address change—starts off, appropriately enough, with a recap of the first film, then launches into the new plot. Ice Cube is back as Capt. Dickson, angry as ever about, well, everything. He explains to his star officers that instead of high school, this time their assignment is to infiltrate a college campus, where they are to locate a drug dealer whose product has been linked to a student’s death.

As college freshmen, Jenko and Schmidt reprise their roles as jock and nerd, frat boy and intellectual (sort of). Jenko joins the football team and Schmidt tries his hand at slam poetry. In the process, they both make connections—one a “bromance,” the other an actual romance—that threaten to fracture their friendship.

This leads to my only real complaint about the film: the homo-erotic hints are way overdone. The first few jokes are funny—sure, a friendship can be like a relationship—but by the fourth, fifth or sixth time Hill looks at Tatum with doe eyes and kicks his feet at the dirt like an abandoned puppy, I wanted to reach out and slap them, then remind them to get back to the action.

Speaking of action, there is plenty of it here, from football games to car chases to a particularly hilarious scene in which the pair try to stealthily break into a frat house to install surveillance equipment while high on the drugs whose source they’re trying to find.

Throughout the film, Ice Cube shows up to make thinly veiled references to the fact that this is a sequel and a remake. He plays pretty prominently in one of the storylines, too, adding his special brand of humor to the mix. The other notable addition to the cast is Jillian Bell (Workaholics), whose quiet introduction into scenes (“How long have you been sitting there?”) is second in hilarity only to her deadpan delivery, mostly of age jokes.

Plain and simple, 22 Jump Street is a lot of fun. With the exception of a few short detours, the plot stays on point, the action keeps it moving, and the comedy keeps everyone laughing.