Occasionally amusing but is always trying too hard

Rating: Null/10 (25 August 2012)

Being in the UK, I was only aware of the show 21 Jump Street retrospectively because of Johnny Depp becoming famous; other than that I had never seen it but figured that this would be fine to watch the film remake. The plot is as the show, two young police officers are selected to go undercover in the school system as students in order to crack open the drugs trade by befriending the dealers and then uncovering the supplier above them. As one would expect, hilarity ensues. Well, sort of.
Billed as a comedy 21 Jump Street could never be accused of being high-brow or setting its sights too high. The tone of the film is not as low as gross-out comedy, but generally the tone is juvenile and consistently crude. This shows itself in the constant swearing, the noise that it brings with itself and the sense of it being a lot less funny than it thinks it is. It is a shame because it had potential; it has a nice tone of self-mockery but it is never done smartly enough to really take (it is spelt out in mile-high letters, ruining the impact it could have had). Along with some of this, there are specific jokes and moments that I laughed at (bits of Ice Cube's excessive delivery, the lack of explosions during a car chase etc) but mostly the humour is broad and wide and simple in the extreme. Part of the problem for me was that it wasn't sharp enough – it felt baggy and relaxed in a way that sort of suits the characters and the tone of the film, but doesn't suit the material. As a result the jokes feel softer than they should be and they are always worked harder than they can stand.
By this I mean the time spent on each. Some are hit and move on and they work well for it, but too often we have the joke settling in and having too much time on it, so that the film and the actors feel like they are trying too hard with lesser material, which I guess is partially true at least. Hill and Tatum benefit from playing against type (to a point) but neither is great here – just noisy and boisterous. Larson has nothing to really do while Franco's main impact is to continually bug you about where you've seen him before (until you realise you're thinking of his brother). Riggle is a funny guy – I know this because I'm a Daily Show fan, but here he is just noisy (a little funny – but not too much). Ice Cube is OK but his one-joke performance really only made me laugh once or twice.
21 Jump Street isn't an awful film by any means – it is just a very broad and unpolished one. The jokes lacks sharpness and the film feels like it is overdoing most things and trying too hard for too little return. There are moments and jokes that made me laugh but they were too few and far between, leaving distracting and slightly amusing noise to fill the rest of the film. So-so at best and it really needs you to be in a lazy, Friday-night mindset before you even bother approaching it.