Self-aware comedy in the last place you'd expect.

Rating: 8/10 (8 July 2014)

Going into this movie, I was pretty skeptical of a sequel's ability to repeat 21 Jump Street's formula - relatively straightforward, slapstick, often crude humor - and come up with something that still entertains. The weaker segments of this movie are indeed the ones where the writers attempt to do exactly this. Some of the film's final act feels rather humorless compared to prior sequences because it draws most of its humor from the already well-developed joke that Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are mismatched.
This is a shame because the rest of the film is brilliant in balancing a varied palette of humor, ranging from well-executed slapstick in the vein of 21 Jump Street, hilarious performances from the entire cast (particularly Ice Cube, whose menacing glare never gets old), and the film's strongest selling point: self-referential humor. A number of scenes or plot devices are of deliberately low quality, which Hill and Tatum point out in apparently clumsy dialogue that lampoons the haste of many studios to rush out sequels. The police force's upper ranks, likewise, become stand-ins for the producers of the film itself as their concerns over a scarce budget and audiences' desire for continuity in sequels directly affect the assignments of the main characters. Another notable running joke is the relationship between Tatum and Hill's characters, whose ups and downs mimic that of a romantic partnership in very deliberate ways. Though this joke threatens to grow old, the film plays off it in a variety of entertaining ways, parodying famous romances (one reference to Annie Hall was perhaps my favorite moment) and stretching it with increasingly complex analogies that keep the trope fresh.
22 Jump Street does best when it doesn't try to be 21 Jump Street, which is fortunately quite often - its relentless mockery of sequels explicitly distances itself from its predecessor. Admittedly, it cannot at times resist using the same devices and style of humor as 21 Jump Street, but it does so as part of an unexpectedly wide arsenal of jokes that ensures that nothing bores the audience. This film was quite a pleasant surprise.