22 Jump Street (4/5 Stars)

The same exact thing but bigger.

According to Urban Dictionary the term ‘meta’ refers to something, generally art, that is characteristically self-referential. The most cliché example ever is the writer who has writer’s blcok that ends up writing a story about a writer who has writer’s block. I have seen this movie plenty of times and it has taken up residence in the shameful corner of my movie critic heart. The reason for this is that the idea seems clever but it is not. Cleverness contains an element of originality and creativity. If the idea has already been done before it cannot be original or creative. There is a caveat to this of course and ’22 Jump Street’ is a particularly good example of it working (at least the first time). ’22 Jump Street’ admits that its meta-ness, i.e. the fact that it is a sequel to a movie that itself was a remake of an old TV show from the 1980s, is not clever.

This is made explicit in the form of the police chief, played by Nick Offerman (the great anti-government crusader Ron Swanson from ‘Parks and Recreation’), who starts off each movie with an explanation as to why this lame excuse of a mission exists at all.  In the first movie with his trademark grouchy annoyance he explained that the 21 Jump Street mission existed because nobody in the police department had any new ideas so they just keep on rehashing old things in hopes that people won’t notice. In ’22 Jump Street’ he explains that nobody cared about 21 Jump Street when they redid it but they got lucky with success, so the department invested a whole lot more money into 22 Jump Street under the stupid impression that maybe if they spent a lot more money they could get that much more success. This influx of new money spent on arbitary shit that has no connection to the success of the mission becomes a running joke in the movie as the sets and gadgets become much more elaborate than they really need to be and characters start drinking espressos for no other reason than because they are more expensive than coffee.

But even this kind of admittance gets kind of exhausting after awhile. Or at least it should be. This is the type of movie that makes fools of movie critics with all their general theories as to what should be better than other things. It’s like a way overpriced tech price that refuses to fall to earth. For my money the reason is that it is genuinely funny and even though it uses a lot of self-referential jokes about sequels, there are plenty of new good one-liners, some great physical comedy, and actual twists in the story that are not predictable. The makers are especially adept at throwing reality to the wind in order to make the whole thing more bright and colorful. For no particular reason the bad guy, Peter Stormare, has a pink backpack. I thought that was funny and applaud such initiative. In other words, this movie like the first one is a much better movie that it should be, and all of these jokes that make fun of the fact that you are watching something that should not have been made seem less like that a writer with writer’s block and more like a cry of help from some seriously competent people that could be doing much better things with their talents.

And they have. The two buddy cops, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are very good actors. Jonah Hill has just wrapped up his second Oscar nomination. Channing Tatum has become a Steven Soderbergh favorite. Ice Cube, once a gangster, is now firmly typecast on the other side of the law. He has done well in both cases. The two directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, have so far made a career of taking cynical ploys of studio executives and making actual art out of them. Their last movie was ‘The Lego Movie’ something I did not see but was also praised by critics. ’22 Jump Street’ was too. These movies makes one wish they branched out into an original story just to see what it would look like. I am convinced that they could deliver it if they were allowed to and the epilogue of this movie, at least to me, comes off as a desperate plea to the audience and the studio to do just that, i.e. please please please no ’23 Jump Street.’

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the movie itself, but then again I don’t have to. It is the same movie. There is a drug dealer on a school campus and the two cops have to find out where the connection is coming from. You saw this movie already! Most of the jokes are based off of that, just far more expensive this time. 

p.s. Rob Riggle’s jokes went too far again. Everything else was generally funny. My favorite had to be the weightlifting part. 

p.s.s. I failed at college. Well I learned a lot of stuff, but cinematically speaking I muffed it.