22 Jump Street

Sneaked into the March release slate without anything resembling expectations, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's TV adaptation and sort-of spoof 21 Jump Street became a surprise 2012 hit. Although I enjoyed parts of that film, especially the ways that it explored genre role-play and undermined conventions of teenage identity, I also felt that the execution was clumsy and inconsistent. What an unexpected joy, then, that this seemingly pointless follow-up burrows even further into the rabbit hole of meta-drenched self-reflexivity, and emerges from the other end as the best pure comedy of the year so far. After the unexpected success of the Jump Street relaunch, buddy cops Schmidt and Jenko (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, an initially awkward pairing that has become a well-oiled comic machine) are recruited to do “the exact same thing,” and from there, the film becomes an anarchic, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-esque auto-critique of unnecessary sequels.