Go ahead and jump
The ‘80s were a bounty era for buddy-cop movies. How do you outdo Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop and all those Simpson-Bruckheimer flicks that set the template for the veiled bromances we’ve come to expect from the cop genre?
Well, you could take on ‘80s TV series 21 Jump Street, the vehicle that launched Johnny Depp on a series of undercover Hollywood roles playing Ed Wood, Hunter S. Thompson, Willy Wonka and others. You could say “undercover” is what Depp’s been about from the beginning, and the new Jonah Hill-Channing Tatum revamp of the same name is no different.
Though I never really tuned into Jump Street back in the day, you don’t really need much briefing to follow this Hollywood redo. With the inspired pairing of Tatum and Hill, you get two movies in one: a cop buddy flick and a high school comedy. Going back to high school — and getting it right — is a perennial Hollywood staple, after all, from Peggy Sue Got Married and Never Been Kissed to Old School and Hot Tub Time Machine. In Jump Street’s back story, Hill plays Schmidt, a nerd in Eminem ‘do and braces who constantly strikes out with the ladies, while Tatum is Jenko, the grunge-haired dumb-but-cool guy. Jump Street’s twist is to put them back in high school seven years after graduation, where they’re undercover cops looking for the supplier of a very bad designer drug. Naturally, things have changed: nerds and geeks now rule the school, and it’s no longer cool to disregard the environment, make un-PC comments, or get lousy grades.
But partying, as always, is still cool. The movie takes a peculiar stance towards drugs, considering that its main characters are supposedly sworn to fight them. Yet they smoke weed, steal drugs from the evidence lockup, and invite minors to drink and party. In one of the film’s more memorable scenes, during an undercover “buy” operation, they are dared into taking the designer drug (apparently a hallucinogen labeled with a cartoon drawing one reads as “Holy Sh*t!”) to prove they’re not “narcs.” Confronted by the school’s gym teacher (Rob Riggle), the drug kicks in and they comically gape as the teacher’s head morphs into an ice cream cone with sprinkles, among other unfortunate things. The movie also parodies the tendency of teens to post YouTube videos of themselves doing drugs, something that is actually more sad than funny, and charts the “Four Phases” of the drug’s effects — among them “The Giggs,” “Over-Falsity of Confidence” and “Tripping Total Ballsack” — and while this stuff is a hoot to young people, it’s not exactly a “Just Say No” PSA.
Still, after a student overdoses on the drug, rookies Schmidt and Jenko are sent by undercover chief Ice Cube to “infiltrate, identify and arrest” the drug kingpins.
At first, Schmidt and Jenko revert to their natural inclinations — the nerd and the jock forced to work together — but the next switch is even funnier: Hill is thrown into sports events and drama classes, while Tatum is stuck in AP (Advanced Placement) Chemistry. Naturally, they learn to develop their latent strengths, with Schmidt learning to be the cool kid he never was in high school, and Jenko learning that smart kids are useful for doing stuff like wiretapping cell phones and blowing things up. Schmidt gains the trust of lead drug dealer Eric (Dave Franco, a midget version of his older brother James) and eventually tracks down the drug supplier, with the help of Jenko’s new nerd pals.
This could all be as stupid and pointless as Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in Starsky and Hutch, but it’s not, because the script by Michael Bacall (from a story idea by Jonah Hill) rocks the one-liners, and speaks da language of today’s youth. Meaning it’s foul-mouthed as much as possible, and makes light of things that people used to take seriously. Like, when Schmidt gets in a fight with a party crasher in his mom’s house which leads to a full-on brawl, and then only later discovers there’s a knife sticking out of his back. “Sh*t! When did that happen?” he says in bemusement. “That’s… awesome!” High fives all around. The script channels the (false) invincibility of youth, without really presenting any of its attendant dangers, but this might be expecting too much from a Jonah Hill movie. (One funny cameo worth mentioning is Depp himself, turning up — undercover, natch — as they same character he played on the TV show, though with three decades more mileage on him. It’s worth a giggle.)
As a duo, Hill and Tatum are so solid that you even forget that they look nothing like high school age; a sequel is already in the works, to be set in college, naturally. Their camaraderie is almost as believable as their constant bitching and sniping at one another. And with its frequent dick jokes, the movie really does resurrect the homoerotic aspects of the ‘80s cop genre, as in the scene where Schmidt tells Jenko, in total sincerity (and in a men’s room, yet), “I cherish you.” Yup. Judd Apatow has a lot to answer for, bros.
