The final bailout

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2014)

The unlikely couple of crime busters--eye-candy, slow-witted Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) and awkward, insecure, pudgy Morton Schultz (Jonah Hill) are back again on the screen in 22 Jump Street.
Economics dictated a sequel to the 2012 21Jump Street, which grossed worldwide $201,585,328, on an investment of $42m, a fivefold return on a dollar committed tot the film!. Unlikely as it seemed, the film turned out to be not only a critical success, but also brought in a high return on investment for Columbia Studios, and acclaim to co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.
Co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller caught a falling star in 21 Jump Street that has never allowed the budding career of Johnny Depp never to fade from public view. On a rainy night, they seized that star to that transmuted an inane teenage cope show into a zany comedy that surprised Columbia Studios turned out to be a runaway commercial bonanza.
21 Jump Street's magic bullet struck a rich vein in the pairing of Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, as a pair of clumsy crime busters, who go undercover as high-school students, to break up a gang of drug dealers, that delighted critics and greatly pleased the public.
Lord and Miller effectively played mockingly off the Odd Couple formula of brawn and brains. Call it a bromance--with louche undertones--ludicrously clownish, that each actor's strength infused in an obvious police story with comic incongruity.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that a sequel was on the boards in 22 Jump Street. Writers simply had to dust off a formula and voila! Jenko and Schulz are off to college for another drug bust. The "boys" are visibly too old to fit into a student body, born for the most part in the 1990s. But we are at the movies where the art of the screen is to suspend belief; we are willing to do so since visions of 21 Jump Street dance in our heads.
And the shekels followed into the coffers to the tune of $253,426,687 worldwide and counting a month after 22 Jump Street premiered, on a$50m investment, turning it into another blockbuster.
And yet, the script monkeyed with a winning formula,by momentarily isolating Jenko from Schultz. Suddenly, manic, depressive Schultz becomes the lothario, a hero capable of seducing women. And here the film goes off the rails straining violently our disposition to believe too readily in Jonah Hill's acting. He is not funny, he is, to put it bluntly, rather pathetic and boorish.
On the other hand, Jenko is sent to the locker room with its heavy, sweaty odor of the homoerotic. By exiling Channing Tatum to jock paradise, his zestful, generous side that in 21 Jump Street made Hill look better than he actually was simply disappears form view.
Lord and Miller, for too long a moment, sacrificed the comic physicality of Tatum which recalls, the young Jean-Paul Belmondo and the middle-aged Jean Marais, as he performs his own stunts.
Jenko has, thanks to a class in human sexuality, a sudden realization of how much words can hurt. At a fleeting, amusing encounter with The Ghost (Peter Stormare), the drug king pin, before he bashes him in the head with his football helmet, he gives him a quick lesson why "faggot" is unsuitable to call someone who is "gay" or "queer" or "LGBT." (As an aside, here real life imitates the cinematic art: Jonah Hill hurled a gay slur at a paparazzo, and on late-night television shows, he had to strike his breast to acknowledge his personal error of judgment.) Feeling that 22 Jump Street was on the brink of a giant yawn, the screenwriters, perhaps, came belatedly to their senses, and reunited our odd couple, since the sequel desperately was in need of the strengths of one and the other.
A shout out to pokerfaced Jillian Bell as Mercedes who spots Schultz for what and who she is, almost steals the film, as the brains behind the drug network.
Once back on the track, 22 Jump Street finds new energy, yet the final sequences of events strains the conceit that Jonah Hill has Captain Marvel heroic abilities. Sadly ,once more, Channing Tatum is sacrificed to the myopic vision of the script.
Rest assured moviegoer, even Lord and Miller know that the cash cow 22 Jump Street is has run dry, and no 23 Jump Street is in the works. The last 15-minutes of film tells us so as in a Dadaesque moment, remarked by nonsense, travesty and incongruity Jump Street in hedge-fund algorithmic fashion is projected out to 2047 with the "ever youthful" Jenko and Schultz as doctors, lawyers, scientists and the like continue in the self-mocking spirit that made 21 Jump Street runaway success it was.