The partners in "22 Jump Street" don't kiss, but the way Hill and Tatum deliver state-of-the-relationship lines while fighting back tears, they don't have to. It might have had other characters kidding about how Schmidt and Jenko should just get a room already, but it wouldn't have elaborated on it at feature length, with such intensity.
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A movie like this could not have been made twenty years ago, or even ten, unless it were preaching to the choir of art house audiences. Is this movie anti-homophobic, or is it dealing in what critic Sam Adams calls " meta-homophobia"? Despite a few crude lapses, it's more the former, I think if anything, this film's relentless joking about Schmidt and Jenko as sweethearts who refuse to consummate feels like a cultural advance. (Schmidt even gets a "walk of shame" after the first night they spend together, clutching his sneakers like heels.) After a while Schmidt starts to suspect that Jenko is in too deep at the frat-not a euphemism, amazingly-and they have a devastating talk that ends with Jenko saying that maybe it's time that they investigated other people. Meanwhile, Schmidt plays femme to Jenko's butch, falling for a poetry major named Maya ( Amber Stevens) and melting around her as a stereotypical female groupie might melt around a young male literary lion. (Jenko has the edge he can open beer bottles with his eyelids.) Their obsessive workouts stand in for the sex they won't have because they're straight.
Their relationship is based on appreciating each other's alpha male awesomeness. Here they're underlined by having Jenko become a football star to buddy up with one key suspect, a quarterback and fraternity bigwig played by Wyatt Russell. The physical differences between the tall, beefy, athletic Jenko and the short, doughy Schmidt were a source of humor in the first film. It takes the homoerotic energy bubbling under the surface of buddy action flicks and raises it into the sunlight, where it can flex its pecs and growl. Still, "22 Jump Street" is a superior example. The James Bond films, Sergio Leone westerns, the " Lethal Weapon" series, the under-seen and underrated " Gunmen," the "Bad Boys" movies, Jackie Chan's whole career, and the aforementioned "Hot Fuzz"-which you should watch immediately if you haven't already-all did it, too, to varying degrees. Schmidt poses as Jenko's blood brother, a schlump.Īnd it's here that the script, credited to Michael Bacall, veers away from pure spoof and becomes what Gender Studies majors might call a deconstruction of masculine codes, kidding the same macho clichés it indulges. Jenko sighs that he's "the first person in my family to pretend to go to college," then gets in good with a fraternity that might be dealing a deadly amphetamine-like drug known as Wi-Fi. There are jokes about how sequels are "always worse the second time around" but they've been given "carte blanche with the budget, mother-r," and how the new precinct house, an open-aired monstrosity, looks "twice as expensive" as the one in the last movie "for no reason" and resembles "a cube of ice" (a phrase uttered when costar Ice Cube appears as the duo's commanding officer, Capt.
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Atmospheric details aside, though, the investigations are so similar that Jenko, Schmidt and other characters remark on their similarity, as well as the fact that this is a sequel to film a based on a TV show, and that nothing of consequence will happen in it. In " 21 Jump Street," officers Jenko ( Channing Tatum) and Schmidt ( Jonah Hill) went undercover at a high school.
And it's very, very, very, very aware of itself as a movie-or "movie." It anticipates any observation or objection you might make and makes it first, with a grin and a shrug. It pushes the meta-humor thing so far that after a while, watching it starts to feel like an amiable surrender to low expectations-not unlike the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road" pictures, some of which felt so obligatory that after a certain point the studio might as well have replaced the films with printed cards telling fans where to send their money.
It's also a sequel about sequels, and the often cynical appeal of sequels. It's a buddy cop movie about buddy cop movies that seems determined to go Edgar Wright's modern classic "Hot Fuzz" one better (nobody can do that, but nice try). It's a legitimate question, not just because "22 Jump Street" is a sequel to a hit, and therefore an example of what's known as a "critic-proof movie," but also because it reviews itself as it goes along.