Movie Reviews

22 Jump Street is the sequel to the surprise hit 21 Jump Street, which in turn was based on the popular tv show of the same name. Just like the first movie, this is a buddy cop movie about buddy cop movies and the only thing 22 Jump Street adds to the first movie is that it is a sequel about sequels. Officers Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) graduate from high school to college this time around to investigate a deadly new drug known as Wi-Fi. Other than that things pretty much stay the same. Remarkably so, even they themselves comment on the similarities.

Taking self-awereness to the next level, writers Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel and Rodney Rothman do an awesome job of constantly being one stap ahead of the viewer. Every time you feel like objecting, they beat you to the punch and makes the joke for you. They also take the homo-erotic energy that’s always simmering in these kind of movies and put it right there where everyone can see it. While Jenko gets in deep with a fraternity, fawning over his newfound workout buddy Zook (Wyatt Russell) who is also a suspect, Schmidt falls for a poetry major named Maya (Amber Stevens). After a while Schmidt gets jealous of Jenko’s bromance and they have a talk after which they decide it might be time to investigate other people.

It’s not all meta-humour though… Tatum and Hill make a great team as they trade off clever lines and (literally) stumble their way through the movie in an effort to uncover the drug ring. It’s the way this movie plays out on different levels, that makes it more entertaining than most comedies and it’s definitely a movie you can watch twice in order to catch all the jokes you missed the first time around. Trust me, there’s quite a lot of them. Oh, and make sure to keep watching the credits… you’ll see that directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller really thought of everything.