The fish out of water theme has returned but this time the background has changed to college life (as opposed to high school) and the roles are reversed with Schmidt (Hill) being the outcast and Jenko (Tatum) being the stud/jock who fits in. It’s also slightly less of a challenge in the suspension of disbelief while seeing these two thirty something actors in college instead of high school.

The story line taps into drugs on campus (this time of the performance enhancing variety) and involves the usual layers of deceit and conspiracy. It’s competently told and does little to get in the way of the laughs. You will not need much gray matter to keep up.

In the comedy department, this is a modern screenplay with a scatter shot approach and subsequently there are some running gags that work and some that do not. The left field funny jabs also score on an intermediate basis. But looked at in total there are more hits than misses.

Rob Hudson
www.22jumpstreet.com.au

How this happened is no real mystery. First it must be said that out of the ten or so people I spoke to before the screening, none had actually seen even a single episode of the eighties era television show, so the slate seems to be clean for a new interpretation with no baggage of having to adhere to fans that know every nuance of the original. The film also steers firmly into the direction of parody and as such takes as many swipes at eighties era society as it does the television of the time.

The casting is contemporarily comic and Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are well cast as Tweedledee and Tweedledumber. The comedy often times veers dangerously close to being cringe worthy but as is the want of films of this type, it throws so many jokes and comic set ups your way that eventually they start to strike the mark. The camaraderie of the two leads is also engaging.

With so many films getting the green light because of a tie in with an existing audience (i.e. remakes and the comic book hero genre) it’s interesting that a film got made about a show that not a lot of people seem that interested in. Without the subsequent high profile career of the originals show’s main actor, it would seem 21 Jump Street would have been relegated to the scrap heap of TV history but instead it has been given life into a new millennium.

Rob Hudson
www.21jumpstreet-movie.com