Constantly hilarious.

Rating: 8/10 (19 June 2014)

The rebooted 21 Jump Street was an unforeseen smash hit in 2012, cleaning up at the box office as well as garnering universal critical acclaim. Its success was helped considerably by the fact that no one gave it much chance of actually being any good. This sequel on the other hand, has high expectations, and it surprisingly lives up to them. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back as undercover agents Schmidt and Jenko – this time attempting to infiltrate a college drug ring – and they have lost none of the odd couple bromantic chemistry that has become the lynchpin of this series. Speaking of bromance, directing duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller return to call the shots, adding a zippiness and stylistic flair to the proceedings and further proving – after the original, Cloudy 1 and The Lego Movie – that they are the masters of fun. All 112 minutes of the runtime are packed with jokes: some fall flat, like the drug- tripping sequence, but most hit the mark. The self-referential humour ("We're throwing double the money at this follow-up, as if it's actually going to make it twice as good") is utterly hilarious, especially as it comes in the most part from Nick 'Ron Swanson' Offerman, and a running gag revolving around a revelation about Captain Dickson's (Ice Cube) daughter, culminating in Tatum's hysterical office crack-up, is fantastic. Even the end credits are a hoot, previewing upcoming franchise outings such as 29 Jump Street: Nurse School and 37 Jump Street: Culinary School, and featuring a string of winking cameos no less. A riotous, tongue- in-cheek comedy that offers nearly two hours of constant amusement and a bunch of belly laughs, all but cementing a third undercover operation in the process.