22 JUMP STREET

 

It's a legitimate question, not just because "22 Jump Street" is a sequel to a hit, and therefore an example of what's known as a "critic-proof movie," but also because it reviews itself as it goes along. It's a buddy cop movie about buddy cop movies that seems determined to go Edgar Wright's modern classic "Hot Fuzz" one better (nobody can do that, but nice try). It's also a sequel about sequels, and the often cynical appeal of sequels. And it's very, very, very, very aware of itself as a movie—or "movie." It anticipates any observation or objection you might make and makes it first, with a grin and a shrug. It pushes the meta-humor thing so far that after a while, watching it starts to feel like an amiable surrender to low expectations—not unlike the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road" pictures, some of which felt so obligatory that after a certain point the studio might as well have replaced the films with printed cards telling fans where to send their money.

In "21 Jump Street," officers Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) went undercover at a high school. In this film, it's college. Atmospheric details aside, though, the investigations are so similar that Jenko, Schmidt and other characters remark on their similarity, as well as the fact that this is a sequel to film a based on a TV show, and that nothing of consequence will happen in it. There are jokes about how sequels are "always worse the second time around" but they've been given "carte blanche with the budget, mother------r," and how the new precinct house, an open-aired monstrosity, looks "twice as expensive" as the one in the last movie "for no reason" and resembles "a cube of ice" (a phrase uttered when costar Ice Cube appears as the duo's commanding officer, Capt. Dickson). Jenko sighs that he's "the first person in my family to pretend to go to college," then gets in good with a fraternity that might be dealing a deadly amphetamine-like drug known as Wi-Fi. Schmidt poses as Jenko's blood brother, a schlump. 

And it's here that the script, credited to Michael Bacall, veers away from pure spoof and becomes what Gender Studies majors might call a deconstruction of masculine codes, kidding the same macho clichés it indulges. This is not a new approach. The James Bond films, Sergio Leone westerns, the "Lethal Weapon" series, the under-seen and underrated "Gunmen," the "Bad Boys" movies, Jackie Chan's whole career, and the aforementioned "Hot Fuzz"—which you should watch immediately if you haven't already—all did it, too, to varying degrees. Still, "22 Jump Street" is a superior example. It takes the homoerotic energy bubbling under the surface of buddy action flicks and raises it into the sunlight, where it can flex its pecs and growl.