Miller and Lord may try to dress these scenes up with manic invention and a dash of improvisation, and-if the Internet is to be believed-their work on The Lego Movie kept them from making the kinds of script revisions that may have resulted from their undivided attention, but these scenes, and others of its kind, like the laughable romance between Schmidt and hot left-brain girl Maya (Amber Stevens), stop the movie dead in its tracks. It’s a transparent bid for suspense that recurs in what feels like over a half-dozen different places in 22 Jump Street’s narrative.

Thus, once the breach is repaired, their victory over the bad guys will be that much sweeter. Since, like its predecessor, 22 Jump Street is an action comedy and a buddy comedy, devoted partners Jenko and Schmidt must endure several threats of imminent divorce, each more serious than the last. As promised-nay, foretold-by dialogue heard at the end of 21 Jump Street, the film’s two “sonsabitches,” hero cops Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum), are “goin’ to college,” on a mission that’s virtually identical to the last one: There’s a popular but potentially lethal party drug on campus, and it’s up to Schmidt and Jenko, once again in the words of Ice Cube’s Captain Dickson, to “infiltrate the dealehs, find the supplieh.”Īs funny and batshit insane as the movie often is, the fact that 22 Jump Street knows it’s a tiresome sequel doesn’t save it from being a tiresome sequel, even as Lord and Miller struggle to conceal the bitter pill of convention in the sweet tapioca pudding of wall-to-wall jokes. As the script itself is only too happy to acknowledge, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s 22 Jump Street takes the goodwill generated by the surprise success of its predecessor, a reboot of the featherweight, late-1980s cop drama, and reinvests it in a new enterprise designed to achieve nothing more than an encore-not a narrative continuation or expansion, but a doubling-down, using nearly twice the original’s budget in the hopes of an even more spectacular victory.

21 jump street full movie age guide