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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

22 Jump Street

22 JUMP STREET (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller). 112 minutes. Opens Friday (June 13). See listing. Rating: NNNN


I don’t even know if there’s a point to reviewing 22 Jump Street – and I don’t mean that as a negative. There’s virtually nothing I can say about this movie that it isn’t already saying for itself.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have constructed a sequel of their self-aware TV adaptation that works like an ouroboros. It’s a snake endlessly eating its own tail at high speed, moving so quickly that it appears to the naked eye as a spinning wheel. (A spinning wheel of dick jokes, mind you, but even so.)

As befitting a sequel, 22 Jump Street levels up accordingly: the action scenes are more ambitious, the sets are more expensive – the new secret headquarters, across the road from the old secret headquarters, comes complete with an espresso bar! – and the stakes are higher, even if the whole point of the exercise is to do exactly what the first movie did.

22 Jump Street has no illusions about why it exists: it was commissioned by a giant corporation to cash in on the success of a movie that was commissioned by the same giant corporation to cash in on the title awareness of the 21 Jump Street TV series. As Nick Offerman’s crusty Deputy Chief Hardy explains to Jonah Hill’s pissy overthinker Schmidt and Channing Tatum’s sweet-natured non-thinker Jenko, this “investigation” is all about getting results: spend more money this time in the hopes of making more money back. And what’s more costly than high school? College.

Thus, Jenko and Schmidt get to take their unlikely buddy act to a fictional Southern California university, assigned to go undercover as freshmen to track down the suppliers of a new drug on campus that’s already left one student dead. As before, they go native almost immediately, Jenko succumbing to the lure of football and frat houses while Schmidt impresses a liberal-arts major (Greek’s Amber Stevens) with an impromptu slam poem and winds up struggling to understand hookup culture.

The real point of reference is the leap from Beverly Hills Cop to Beverly Hills Cop II, which doused the scrappy premise of Martin Brest’s character-driven blockbuster in slick Tony Scott gloss.

But where Scott leaned into his sequel’s action sequences at the expense of the characters, Lord and Miller refuse to do so. They still craft terrific chases and fights, but they ground everything in the contrast between Jenko’s gung-ho energy and Schmidt’s nervous hesitation. And that’s a dynamic that never stops paying off.

There is nothing here that we haven’t seen before, but Lord and Miller understand that. As they did with the first picture – and with the brilliant Lego Movie earlier this year – they use familiarity against itself, turning tropes into their own punchlines and commenting constantly on the profound silliness of pretending this specific story hasn’t been told before.

There’s a term for this sort of thing in comedy writing: it’s called “hanging a lantern.” Lord and Miller hang lanterns everywhere they go, layering them into the scope of the film with remarkable grace. There are jokes in the names of buildings, in the background dialogue at a football game, in the clothes the characters wear. Schmidt and Jenko’s relationship itself is a running gag, and even though Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost presented a complete thesis on the buddy-cop movie as homoerotic love story in Hot Fuzz, Lord and Miller (and Tatum and Hill) have found a few new jokes in there.

Wait… I’m how many hundreds of words into this and I haven’t mentioned the film’s brilliant use of Ice Cube and Jillian Bell? Dammit. But that’s the fun of 22 Jump Street, which is basically a toy box full of wonderful things.

And yes, you’ll want to stay for the credits.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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