21 Jump Street

Based on the 1980s television show, 21 Jump Street follows two inept cops (Jonah Hill’s Schmidt and Channing Tatum’s Jenko) as they’re sent undercover into a local high school to find and arrest an up-and-coming drug dealer. There’s little doubt that 21 Jump Street gets off to a tremendously promising start, as filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller have infused the proceedings with a briskly-paced and pervasively lighthearted feel that proves impossible to resist. The movie’s affable atmosphere is undoubtedly heightened by the efforts of its stars, with Hill and Tatum’s easygoing, engaging work mirrored by an eclectic supporting cast that includes, among others, Ice Cube, Dave Franco, Chris Parnell, and Nick Offerman. It’s only as time progresses that Michael Bacall’s decidedly erratic screenplay becomes more and more problematic, as the narrative is increasingly dominated by ineffective, pointless sequences that wreak havoc on the movie’s momentum. (And it doesn’t help, either, that large chunks of the film have been improvised wholesale by the various actors, which only exacerbates the film’s excessively slapdash feel.) The growing emphasis on eye-rollingly sentimental elements (eg Schmidt and Jenko’s falling out, the impending revelation that Schmidt and Jenko are cops, etc, etc) diminishes the strength of the film’s few genuinely amusing sequences, and it’s subsequently not surprising to note that 21 Jump Street fizzles out rather demonstrably in the build up to its overlong and anticlimactic action-oriented finale – which ultimately confirms the movie’s place as yet another disappointingly misguided reboot of an ’80s property.

** out of ****

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