Stars: Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Brie Larson, Dave Franco
Director: Phil Lord, Chris Miller
Rated: R
Showing: Neptune Cinema week of Friday, April 13 - daily 7:30pm; except Sunday 5:30pm. For more information call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 109 minutes
Action/comedy
It was a simpler time, when Johnny Depp was new to Tiger Beat, when hair metal still ruled the airwaves and when Fox was an infant TV network with a bare handful of series: The Simpsons, America's Most Wanted and this silly cop confection called 21 Jump Street.
Now, that teen-friendly cop show has been updated and unleashed in the post Hangover era - when no joke is out of bounds, no language is too profane, no riff on drugs or sex is too extreme.
You'd expect a big-screen version of 21 Jump Street, the TV series that made Depp famous, to be a joke. And it is - a raunchy, violent and potty-mouthed farce that straddles the middle ground between Starsky & Hutch and Superbad. It's Project X with pistols.
The cute young cops here aren't Tiger Beat-cute the way Depp and co-stars Holly Robinson and Peter DeLuise were. And they're self-aware. They're incompetent, and they know it.
In high school, Jenko (Channing Tatum) was the popular, handsome jock who "didn't learn a thing" during his years there. Poor Schmidt (Jonah Hill) was the insecure, nonathletic brainiac who always choked when the chips were down - asking a girl to the prom, for instance. Jenko used to pick on Schmidt.
But when they help each other get through the police academy, they become best buds. And being, as the captain in charge (Ice Cube) puts it, "Justin Bieber/ Miley Cyrus-looking," they're naturals for the revival of an old program - putting baby-faced cops back into high school to hunt down the dealers and suppliers of a deadly new drug.
Jenko is set to slide back into the Prom King status he enjoyed just a few years before, with Schmidt doomed to relive his chemistry whiz nobody liked. But the idiots botch their assumed identities. Schmidt is now the alleged jock, Jenko the brains.
And high school has changed in the seven years since they graduated. The enviro-nerd (Dave Franco) is king of the cool kids. Caring about schoolwork is cool, drama club is cool, and picking on a gay kid isn't.
And even though they only have three basic rules to adhere to - find the supplier, don't get expelled and don't sleep with students or faculty - Jenko and Schmidt, alias Doug and Chad, screw things up.
The co-directors of the adorably irreverent and sweet animated hit Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs stick pretty close to formula here.
Hill does his usual chubby-white-kid-talking-ghetto smack. But Tatum (The Vow), given the chance to cut up and cut loose, dives into this head first, mocking his good looks and playing the male bimbo thing to the max. Jenko's report to the captain about high school today being the reverse of when jocks like him ran the show is angry, wounded and hilarious.
Like high school itself, 21 Jump Street"hits the wall about halfway in and even prom night can't save it. It relies on profane tirades from Ice Cube (funny, you have to admit), yet another teen party that gets out of hand and over-the-top violence, and loses track of these two guys living the reverse of their high school days.
And joking about how lame it is to recycle formulas, stereotypes and movie cliches doesn't excuse you from using them as crutches, one after the other.
Next attraction: TBA