"22 Jump Street" (2014)

Sequels are inherently tricky to make. Take away too much of what made the first film tick and you may lose interested audiences, but create a film that does too much of the same and you’ll leave most people slightly disappointed. Sequels, which are partly what 22 Jump Street is consciously in conversation with, typically double down on what made their predecessors successful; more is more. They mostly fall flat but some stalwarts admirably collapse under their burden, and that’s largely the case with 22 Jump Street.  

The dynamic writing-directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller return to helm the film. Lord and Miller have auspiciously proven themselves capable of producing high quality mainstream films, and from highly disreputable, seemingly unadaptable properties. Their films, whether it’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or The Lego Movie, sparkle with personality and wit, and they feature clever, smartly written stories. 

More importantly, in the instance of 22 Jump Street, these films are movie-movies, self-conscious of their existence as a movie. This meta-exercise was teased out to an extent in 21 Jump Street and it reached its zenith in The Lego Movie, and it’s written all over 22 Jump Streets’ DNA. Lord and Miller constantly poke fun at the inanity of this sequel’s existence and the pitfalls and pratfalls that happen more generally time and again in second films. 

The problem here is that the film falls for the very issues it makes light of. “Give them more of the same,” a weary police chief tells best buds and police partners Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) early in the film, and the film proceeds to do mostly that. The film acknowledges the tropes, as if subversively, before playing to those tropes.

But even if Schmidt and Jenko are loose cannon cops who do play by the rules, 22 Jump Street retains much of the humor of the first film. There are diminishing returns, but the film remains funny by accepting that it is a sequel and thus unlikely to top itself, hard as it does try. 

Rather than being sent to high school like in the first film, Schmidt and Jenko are sent undercover at a college to bust a drug ring of Adderall-heavy drugs called why-phy (pronounced wi-fi) by Capt. Dickson (a more widely and effectively used Ice Cube). The partnership and friendship is once again strained and tested, and the film has fun joking about the two being what amounts to an old married, gay couple, including a great "couples therapy" scene and a hilarious women and gender studies-inspired put down of the word “faggot”. 

There are Apatow-ian fundamentals of storytelling here: it's a story of male homosocial bonds that reaffirms the value and importance of those relationships. Schmidt and Jenko’s relationship is that of the bromance variety, and the film examines what drives and gives strength to the bonds of male friendships, especially codependent ones like theirs. As Richard Lawson notes, “But clearly the ‘aren’t sequels dumb’ action-comedy framework of ‘22 Jump Street’ is just a cover for these two fine actors to investigate a particularly close bond between two men.” The film is laden with jokes about the homoeroticism inherent to the action genre and stays just on the right side of not falling into the homophobic traps of the films it mocks. 

Schmidt starts dating Maya (Amber Stevens) who lives across the hall from the deceased woman who sparked the investigation, and she turns out to be more than she appears on the surface -- in a twist that is brilliant and hilarious and that is too good to spoil here. Jenko befriends a quarterback (Wyatt Russell), with possible ties to the drug trade, and the dude seems to be a blonde-haired doppelganger, as airheaded and puppy dog enthusiastic as Jenko.

The case is almost beside the point though (it hits the same storytelling beats as the case from the first film, a fact that doesn’t go unnoted); this is first and foremost a mismatched buddy cop comedy that derives its entertainment value primarily from letting its two talented, funny leads riff off one another and on the increasingly absurd situations they are in. While Hill has long been known to have comedic chops, Tatum again proves himself hysterical by playing up vapid idiocy.  

Calling attention to the ways sequels conspicuously fail to live up to expectations due to quality control and profit motives only takes the film so far. 22 Jump Street is brazen about its disregard for being anything other than an exercise in navel-gazing-heavy deconstruction, at times to a fault. It’s a movie that knows it’s a movie, that's aware of the fault-lines of the films it mocks and caricatures, and then does everything it claims it’s a tiny bit above. The shtick is amusing for a while but it wears thin – then again, it’s aware that it wears thin, right?

Grade: B