Review: ’22 Jump Street’

The comedy sequel is a tough nut to crack. It is nearly impossible to recapture the magic that makes a comedy so memorable and fun to begin with, as if there is some sort of blueprint to making a great comedic film, and usually we are left with at best pale imitations of the great comedy that we all remember fondly or at worst an abomination of a film that would even make us question why we liked the original movie in the first place. So where does “22 Jump Street,” the sequel to the surprise comedy hit, fit on this spectrum of disappointing and sub par comedy sequels?

Well, nowhere really. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, I wouldn’t have believed that a comedy sequel could have been so funny and enjoyable and downright comparable to the original, but I DID see it, I DID hear it, and believe me when I tell you that I did laugh. And I laughed and I laughed, because “22 Jump Street” is damn funny front start to finish.

But there are more than just the laughs, as “22 Jump Street” actually builds off the relationship of the two main characters Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum). They play off the fact that movies like this often feature a slightly homoerotic man on man kinship at the center, as two seemingly disparate dudes do some serious bonding, usually through carnage and action and well timed gallows humor, and even go so far as to feature at least a couple of scenes in which their partnership is mistaken as a partnership, one featuring an emotionally distant Jenko and an increasingly needy Schmidt.

And whereas “21 Jump Street” featured the nerdy Schmidt fitting in with the current crop of high school kids and the once-cool Jenko finding himself bonding with the school nerds, “22 Jump Street” flips that script, with the meat-headed Jenko finding himself at home in college life, while the smarter Schmidt feels left out of all the fun and bro-ing out and bonding and stuff, especially when Jenko finds himself a possible new BFF in the form of Zook (Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt). This allows us to see the characters in a different light as opposed to the last movie, and which allows the characters room to grow and change, as opposed to just hitting the same exact emotional beats over and over.

Also make no mistake that the writing and directing power team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller (henceforth known as LORD MILLER) knew exactly what they were doing when they made this thing, and they definitely wanted everyone to know it. Just like how “21 Jump Street” started out with Nick Offerman’s police deputy chief character telling Jenko and Schmidt that the “Jump Street” program was something the department heads were reviving from the 1980’s because they were out of ideas, “22 Jump Street” starts with the same deputy chief character explaining that everyone was surprised by the success of the program (i.e. the fact that the movie didn’t bomb) and now the department wants to invest a lot of money to ensure that the “Jump Street” program continues (i.e. film franchising), and lordy do they hit this joke home A LOT throughout the movie. It’s knowing and winking in just the right way, because pretty much the movie is saying what we are all thinking (well, most of us anyway).

But really I think it should be obvious to everyone now that the team of LORD MILLER is just that formidable of a creative force, able to do the seemingly impossible with projects that would have proven to be terrible ideas in the hands of other people. When the Lego people wanted to make a movie that would appeal to everyone, no one thought it would work. And yet “The Lego Movie” is awesome. No one thought “21 Jump Street” would be funny and no one thought a good comedy sequel could be made, yet there they go and here we are.

There are plenty of reasons to see “22 Jump Street,” but I ain’t here to spoil jokes and describe scenes. If you liked the first movie, you are going to like this one, for sure. All hail LORD MILLER.