Director: Phil Lord & Chris Miller
Talent: Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Brie Larson, Dave Franco
Release Date: 16th March 2012
Michael Bacall, writer of Project X and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, may have come through with 2012’s finest mainstream comedy in the shape of 21 Jump Street, a “remake” which strives to preserve very little of the almost unanimously derided television series for which it is named. On paper, things do not look promising: Jonah Hill is the marquee name, up alongside Channing “Dear John” Tatum and James Franco’s little brother (he looks a lot like him! Which do you prefer?), it’s directed by two people, it’s a remake of a police TV show from the 80s, and Ice Cube is in it. But, against all odds, 21 Jump Street manages to be alternatingly hilarious, charming, irreverent, good-natured and gruesome. Hill and Tatum’s indubitable chemistry anchors a self-consciously outrageous plot, in which they are commanded to go undercover to infiltrate a high school drug-ring. They mix up their false identities on the first day, with Hill conscripted into running track and performing in the high school play, at the auditions for which he meets his sweetheart (a warm and witty Alison Brie), and Tatum forced into Advanced Placement Chemistry (wherein he is ogled by his teacher, the manic Ellie Kemper) and Band; this time around in school, Hill is popular, and Tatum is the social outcast.
Kudos are due for the manner in which Hill’s budding romance with Brie (the newly svelte actor perhaps having forsaken the other kind) is handled: gone is the troubling arc of similar relationships from his previous work: “nice guy” fancies girl for a long time, thus she eventually falls in love with him, to be replaced by a charming courtship, played bravely straight amidst the tongue-in-cheek chaos, in which their respective feelings for one another seem natural and born of mutual respect. It is not Brief Encounter, but for a blockbuster comedy, it’s an extremely positive step. Lord and Miller do not skip out on providing memorable action set-pieces: a frantic freeway chase in which a pursuer falls off his motorbike and has his legs crushed by a passing truck being one highlight amongst many. Hill and Tatum forcing one another to vomit up the drugs they have swallowed by “fingering” one another’s mouths is a glorious piece of original extremity, not least for Hill’s verbal emetic: “Your grandmother’s vagina! And there’s a dick going into it!” By managing to straddle sincerity and hilarity so capably, 21 Jump Street surely enters the canon of buddy cop movies. One awaits the college-bound sequel with baited breath.
Words: Oisín Murphy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k0mo_oJfn4
