Both my wife and myself loved 21 Jump Street so it’s no surprise that we’re down with watching this sequel. In fact I’d originally put the first movie on our watch-list only when I heard that this sequel is better than the first one. I don’t think it’s quite that good but it is appreciably better than most sequels turn out to be and one way it achieves this is by being all meta and self-aware that it is a sequel.
The self-references begin right from the start. Following the success that they experienced in the first film, the police chief tries to use Schmidt and Jenko like regular detectives. When that fails, he gives up and decides that they might as well do everything like the first time and assign them to go undercover as students again to bust a drug ring. This time it’s in a college and the formula gets flipped around again with the beefy Jenko becoming friends with the star athletes while the overweight Schimidt is the unpopular hanger-on.
22 Jump Street goes all in with the bromance angle, so much so that it is barely a cop movie at all. Instead it explicitly patterns itself as the sequel of a romance movie. The couple starts out being together and vows to stay true to each other come hell or high water. But a rival enters the picture and challenges their faithfulness, in this case a fellow athlete named Zook (played by Wyatt Russell, the son of Kurt Russell) who seems perfectly in tune with Schmidt. As such it playfully goes through all of the stages of such stories: jealous stalking, miserable wallowing, getting back together “just one-time” and so on. All of these tropes would be execrable in a normal romance movie but feels brilliant here.
The formula is less fresh the second time around but it’s hard to fault them for trying to make up for that with sheer enthusiasm and energy. The jokes aren’t high brow stuff but they’re good enough to keep my wife, who doesn’t care much for comedies, chuckling most of the time. I especially appreciated the meta jokes that play with this being a sequel including all of the expectations that this carries, such as it being exactly the same as the first one just more expensive. Lines of dialogue like Ice Cube saying that they need to justify the increased budget, including the 800 dollars shoes that he wears and that the audience doesn’t even get to see, come close to breaking the fourth wall which will be hit or miss for some people. Still, it’s a trick that they can only pull off once.
This film does sacrifice any sense of this being a plausible cop show. One thing I liked about the first one was that the plot, for all its zaniness, still felt like it could take place in the real world. This one ends with exaggerated action scenes that aren’t realistic in the least. It’s okay to end the movie in this way but it makes me hope that they’ll end the franchise like that with this big bang. In any case, the end titles make it clear that the film makers agree about how preposterous any sequels will be while having great fun with the silly possibilities. These are pretty much the best end title jokes I can think of in any movie.
Overall this film was what I’d expected, a competent and worthy sequel to a solid Hollywood action-comedy. I may not hope for yet another sequel starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum but trying a version with a female duo as they are planning to seems like an interesting direction to go with this formula.