In an early scene in 22 Jump Street, deputy police chief Hardy says of the new undercover assignment that the amiable clown-cops Jenko and Schmidt have been put on: “It’s always worse the second time around”. That’s only one of countless self-deprecatory gags that the directors and the scriptwriters have littered the 112-minute film with. We’re required to acknowledge that the scriptwriters have anticipated our reaction to 22 Jump Street’s same-old, same-old plotline from 21 Jump Street-two bumbling cops going undercover in a high school/college to bust an on-campus drug ring and are mocking themselves (and other directors of sequel flicks) pre-emptively and sportingly.
22 Jump Street is all about self-referential inside jokes, the ones that typically work within a closed circle of peers. There are also countless pop-cultural allusions that fly about, which — if you catch them in real time — ought at least to induce a chuckle. But it is, from the opening frames until the pointedly in-your-face end-credits (do stay to watch!), a send-up of itself and of the genre of comedic sequels that mercenarily milk the popularity of an earlier outing.
But just the fact that you’re good-naturedly laughing at yourself doesn’t make you funny or evolved. Particularly when the rest of the comedy routine revolves around profanity-loaded, scatological, slapstick frat-boy antics that cater to the lowest common denominator of audience appeal. Intended as goofy, the gags are, beyond a point, merely groan-inducing.
The script also relies excessively on taking the bro-mance between Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill to the very edge of gaydom — and then contrives to beat us on the head for even nursing the thought that they were anything more than buddies-in-arms. There is, of course, a certain odd-couple chemistry between them, but it’s not enough to get you rolling in the aisles. The revelation, if anything, is Tatum: that he’s beefcake is self-evident; but, particularly in this outing, he expands the canvas of his comedic repertoire, which may have amounted to something if the scriptwriters and the directors hadn’t been so preoccupied with parodying themselves.
For the few fleeting flashes of passable comedy, though, you must look elsewhere in the film. Ice Cube, reprising his role as the profanity-spewing Capt Dickson, kills it in the scene where he figures out whom Hill has been sleeping with and throws a slapsticky tantrum. And television star Jillian Bell, who plays Mercedes, the sarcasm-dripping roommate of Schmidt’s love interest Maya (Amber Stevens), is drop-dead funny with her deadpan put-downs.
But that’s too few guffaws, stretched out over too many reels, for it to sustain viewer interest, particularly since the frat-boy pranks and the irony overload grate in the extreme. Hardy was right after all: It’s always worse the second time around.
