I am an unabashed 21 Jump Street fan (yes, the show from the 80s). I can clearly remember watching the show from its absolute premier to its cancellation. I am not sure what drew it to me in the first place, but to my young mind these “cop” turned high school students were the coolest people I knew. Fast forward to the 21st century and now due to the originality and genius of Hollywood we have a movie. Refreshingly, the movie takes a totally different approach to the story, not just bringing back the original characters back and just retelling some lost and forgotten plot line that couldn’t cut it for the original show, we are treated to an almost self aware parody of buddy cops in a similar vein of the Other Guys, just with more high school students.
Starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as youthful looking inept cops who almost as a last resort are co-opted into a revived program from the 80s in which cops infiltrate high schools to fight crime. Both officers learn as they re-enter the awkward years of high school once again that thing have significantly changed from the last time that they were there. In a way it is kind of exposes the fantasy that a lot of people had of going back to high school and doing things differently, sort of the “had I know then what I know now” feeling that I feel time to time what I am remising of the “good” old days with my friends.
While the end of the movie devolves into more or less of a standard buddy cop movie, there is enough of quirky moments, which I attribute to the directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller who also made one of the more quirky and unexpectedly good animated films of the past couple of year Cloudy With A Change of Meatballs. As I said before, the story comes from an entirely different direction that one would expect. There was plenty of laugh out loud parts in the movie, but ultimately it was the jux-position of the actual movie from the possible disaster that it could have been which makes the movie feel better than it likely is. One last thing I have to mention is cameos in the film, while the big surprise Cameo is both cool and utter ridiculous at the same time which I couldn’t help but love, if you are careful you will also see a number of other cameos that would interest fans of the show.
P.S.A. D and I make it a point to wait until the utter end of all the credits of a movie just in case there are any additional scenes that they might throw in, sometime it is worth it and sometime it is super annoying waiting until the end of a movie to find that there is nothing there. So as a public service I am going to tell you not to wait, there is nothing at the end of the credits.
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