22 Jump Street movie review & film summary (2014)

Is this movie anti-homophobic, or is it dealing in what critic Sam Adams calls "meta-homophobia"? Despite a few crude lapses, it's more the former, I think; if anything, this film's relentless joking about Schmidt and Jenko as sweethearts who refuse to consummate feels like a cultural advance. A movie like this could not have been made twenty years ago, or even ten, unless it were preaching to the choir of art house audiences. It might have had other characters kidding about how Schmidt and Jenko should just get a room already, but it wouldn't have elaborated on it at feature length, with such intensity. The partners in "22 Jump Street" don't kiss, but the way Hill and Tatum deliver state-of-the-relationship lines while fighting back tears, they don't have to. There's a closeup of the pouty-lipped Jenko dolled up for a fraternity rush party, too-tight puka necklace choking his Frankenstein's-monster neck, that distills a century's worth of fratboy sublimation to one image. 

Hill and Tatum are a brilliant team. They play dumb the way Jelly Roll Morton played piano. Tatum, in particular, has a gift for portraying lunkheaded goodness. No matter who you are, Jenko is happy to see you, and if you're nice to him, he'll love you till the end of time. He's the biggest, brawniest puppy in film history: Marmaduke as played by a human.

This seems as good a place as any to note that "22 Jump Street" is the latest film by directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the auteurs behind a range of self-aware blockbusters, including the "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" films, "The Lego Movie" and "21 Jump Street." Lord and Miller are masters of eating their cake and having it, too. In all of their work—but "The Lego Movie" especially—you get the sense that they've thought long and hard (ahem) about the essence of the thing they're spoofing, and what, exactly, the viewer's thirst for that sort of entertainment says about them personally, as well as the culture that enfolds us. The "Lego Movie" song "Everything is Awesome" might be the definitive statement on consumerism as a way of life. The hero is a wage slave, living in an endless boring loop that he's convinced himself is peachy. Hype encourages him to feel that way because if he accepts his manufactured life, nobody involved in creating institutional structures or manufacturing goods or entertainment will have to try harder, much less change anything. Nobody questions. The money just flows.

That's a bracingly cynical point-of-view when you consider that Lord and Miller's films are part of the status quo that they're implicitly railing against. With its paint-by-numbers plotting and open acknowledgment that nothing onscreen makes sense (everyone thinks the cops are too old to pass for college dudes, and Schmidt's girlfriend's roommate, a witheringly sarcastic young woman played by Jillian Bell, demands that Schmidt "tell us about the war, any of them"), "22 Jump Street" is the sort of film that the Lego guy might watch alone in his nondescript little Lego apartment while eating Lego snacks from a Lego bowl and smiling desperately.