21 Jump Street

A police comedy. Schmidt and Jenko knew each other at school. One was a nerd, the other an athlete, and both were humiliated at graduation. Years later they meet at the police academy. One is weak in the physical tests, the other in the classroom; they team up and complete each other. Their first assignment is bicycle patrol in a park. They botch an arrest and are sent as punishment to an old unit that has been reopened. The assignment is to go undercover at a school. A new drug is circulating and the source is to be found. From there the film is a story of swapped places. The identities get mixed up; the athlete lands in the classes and the nerd in the popular group. What the narrative is interested in is not policing but a changed school: the film shows that in eight years it has turned over completely; being a bully no longer brings status and the popular children are environmentalists. The humour turns on itself. The film says outright in one line that it is an adaptation, that nobody has a new idea, and that they are bringing back old series. The drug sequence is its best constructed scene and the stages of the effect are written out on screen one by one. In the chase the expected explosions never happen, and that is a repeated joke. The source is a television series of the late 1980s; that show's lead appears briefly in the film. Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Brie Larson, Dave Franco and Ice Cube are in the cast. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes crude but clever genre parody. Who it is not for: anyone looking for clean humour; the language is hard and the jokes are explicit.