Good, but with reservations

Rating: 7/10 (20 March 2012)

Incompetent cops Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are assigned to a special squad where youthful looking officers are placed undercover in schools to investigate juvenile criminality: in their case, a new drug. In a curious reversal of when they were at school together, dozy jock Jenko is no longer cool, while dumpy nerd Schmidt is.
Being British, and therefore unexposed to the TV series to which this film purports to be a reworking, I can ignore the former and concentrate on the latter.
This is very much a comedy in the modern style: vast amounts of bad language and a fair amount of drug use (but very little sex: US cinema likes to talk about it, but not show it). I tend not to like films which rely on this for their humour: fortunately, 21 Jump Street has at its heart a) an effective situation, and b) a relationship between two fundamentally decent men. I'm not a big Jonah Hill fan, but he continues to surprise me by not playing the same character in every film. And Channing Tatum shows that the comedy flair he demonstrated in The Dilemma was no fluke.
This film is quite funny - I chuckled often, though I didn't find it anywhere near as uproariously funny as the squinting, shrieking, sheepdog-fringed queen of UK TV film reviews (or her smug, sofa-sharing sidekick) seemed to. And I was somewhat uneasy at the way the climax tried to marry humour and violence. But overall, if you are OK with the language, drugs and violence, this may be worth a visit.