With winks toward its sequel status, its epic bromance, and its cops-undercover-as-kids premise, 22 Jump Street is the summer’s most self-mocking movie. And it’s even funnier than the first installment.
Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in 22 Jump Street
Glen Wilson/Columbia Pictures
Filmmaking team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have now made a movie based on a 32-page picture book (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs), another one based on a line of toys (The LEGO Movie), a big screen adaptation of a very '80s TV series (21 Jump Street), and a sequel to the same (22 Jump Street). These are the kind of projects that, when they're announced, are viewed as signs of how creatively desperate Hollywood has become. Look what they're trying to making a movie out of now!
But all four of the aforementioned films have been improbably and rousingly good, proof that talented writers and directors can use any material as a launching pad for something entertaining and cinematic. Lord and Miller also have been getting more and more self-referential about making supposedly mindless studio movies, from 21 Jump Street's constant winking at its cops-go-undercover-in-high-school premise ("You look really old. Were you held back?") to The LEGO Movie's have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too subversion of its giant exercise in product placement.
But 22 Jump Street, which hits theaters this Friday, is Lord and Miller's most meta effort yet. It's a movie that doesn't just continue to poke fun at its own setup, but digs into the conventions of buddy cop movies and franchises, spinning and spinning until it catches its own tail. It doesn't have the pleasant surprise factor of the first film, but it's actually even better.
"Ladies, nobody gave a shit about the Jump Street reboot, but you got lucky."
Glen Wilson/Columbia Pictures
22 Jump Street is, first and foremost, a sequel about sequels. Reprising his role as Deputy Chief Hardy at the beginning of the film, Nick Offerman delivers the equivalent of studio notes to Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) after their attempt at a slightly more standard drug bust goes wrong: "Do the same thing as last time!" It's a refrain that continues throughout the movie as the dynamic-ish duo goes undercover again, this time as college students.
Schmidt and Jenko are using their old sibling aliases and are still living together, this time in a dorm rather than with Schmidt's parents. They're still looking to bust a designer drug ring, with the new product in question being WHYPHY, a combination of Adderall and ecstasy. And one of them gets a little too caught up in the life he's faking, only this time it's Jenko, who tearfully notes, "I'm the first person in my family to pretend to go to college."
How much of an obligation a sequel has toward being more of the same, only bigger, is an ongoing concern of 22 Jump Street. The movie even includes a hilariously unlikely in-universe explanation for its title and at one point suggests a character's probably the villain solely based on his being the rough equivalent of the villain in the first movie. (He's not, and 22 Jump Street actually manages to quite deftly balance being a sequel with being a movie in its own right.)
It's a self-mocking tendency that reaches brilliance during the closing credits, which I won't spoil other than to note that if 22 Jump Street willed itself into existence with the throwaway punchline of the first film, then the jokes that make up the end of the second suggest Schmidt and Jenko are destined to be around for a long time.
