The rest of Hollywood should be taking notes as this is how you properly do an action-comedy. 21 Jump Street is a slickly made, very funny and surprisingly heartfelt movie that’s quite the rarity in mainstream cinema.
Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, an unlikely pairing if ever there was one, play Schmidt and Jenko respectively, a couple of rookie cops who were basically enemies in high school but are now the best of friends. When they mess up their first arrest they are reassigned to 21 Jump Street and a revitalised ’80s police program (see what they did there?) in which they are assigned to do uncover work in a high school in order to stop the supply of a dangerous new drug among the students.
Following in the footsteps of Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo and WALL-E to John Carter) and Brad Bird (The Incredibles to Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol), directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller have moved out of animation (they made Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) into live-action and with a script by Michael Bacall (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) have delivered not just a competent buddy cop movie but an exemplary one that mixes often laugh-out-loud humour – an exquisite mix of juvenile and genuinely witty – with authentically thrilling action. Whether it be Hill and Tatum bouncing quips off one another or a freeway car chase including gags about whether or not there’s going to be a huge explosion, the film is just flat-out entertaining.
Hill and Tatum work so well together despite them being about as much of a match as the filmmaking styles of Werner Herzog and Michael Bay. Hill has already proven himself a funny and likeable presence so it’s Tatum that’s the real, very welcome surprise. He’s never really done anything comedic like this before and it completely works. He actually has great comic timing – I would be interested to see if he could carry a comedy by himself – and can blend that well with the action that the film has in abundance. He may have found his cinematic calling with this.
It may not be breaking any new ground with its story – it is a big-screen update of an old TV show after all – and it does run out of steam a tad towers the end. But as a whole 21 Jump Street is a refreshing mix of comedy and action that works just as well as one of those as it does the other. A lot of it relies heavily on the two leads but in spite of them being mismatched, perhaps even because of that, the film is a ton of fun.
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