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Starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum
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Pick a side. You want to make that guy cry? You want him to relive his high-school nerd-bath through a prism of pretty people, tap him up full of memories and leave him to puke his insecurities out over the aisle in a stream of regret and Minstrels? Or do you want him to laugh so much that they fly out of his nose like a defective rabbit? PICKCHOOSE.
Or don’t, do both a bit, just cram whatever jokes you can think up into 109 minutes and try to shoehorn some crumbs of meaning and moral in there wherever there’s a couple of free seconds. 21 Jump Street knows it hasn’t got a lot of cultural cache, the pitch being thrown out by a bit-part police chief in the first couple of minutes; people don’t have any new ideas anymore, so why not just take something from a while back that tickles a couple of synapses, put some hot young studs in there and wuzzabluzzablah movie or something.
It’s Starsky and Hutch. Nearly ten years on from Bowen Willer propping up the corpse of a half-loved old TV show and stuffing it with scat-humour, screenwriter Michael Bacall’s picked a show from a decade later and done exactly the same thing; it’s nonsensical, it’s stupid every couple of seconds, there’s even a bit where one of the cops gets stabbed in the back, in a film which doesn’t know what a metaphor is. There’s nothing new here.
It also pretty majorly fails in the light/shade department. Falling so heavily on the Minstrel-nostriling chuckle spike means that any real sentiment or commentary on age-divisions doesn’t get the heft to make you care, with only the ever-excellent Brie Larson providing any capable naturalism. It’s a shame that more stuff can’t go full on comedy-mental; if it’s making you spasm with laughter every fifteen seconds then you couldn’t give a flying one about character development or backstory. Films used to do it. They should try doing it some more.
But hell, it’s funny quite a bit, and that’s enough. Drug drug-outs, severed dicks and dry-humping all raise a laugh gargle, whilst Channing Tatum and the aforementioned wonder-Larson compete admirably in the physical comedy stakes, the former proving as limbically talented as he is small and weak and the latter flailing about in the most subtle display of roll-around backseat car-chase stupidity ever seen on film. There’s even a surprisingly brutal neck-shot cameo from someone who really doesn’t have to be here, adding kudos just by their presence, which is nice. Overall it’s relentlessly stupid, nobody seems that interested and there’s an amazingly desperate beg for a sequel, but tank yourself up on hooch and you might be lucky enough to throw up all over the armrest in hilarity. See you for the Due South remake in 2018!
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