22 Jump Street

22 JUMP STREET (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2014)

A glance at Hollywood studios’ release schedules fat with sequels, remakes, and reboots conveys the message that if at first you succeed with something, repeat until you’ve wrung every last cent out of it. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller achieved the unlikely in guiding an adaptation of the late 1980s/early ‘90s TV series 21 JUMP STREET to creative and financial success, making 22 JUMP STREET a given. Like many follow-ups, this one essentially hits all of the same beats that worked before while tweaking the specifics enough to avoid being a complete rehash. The difference in 22 JUMP STREET is that screenwriters Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman call attention to the business of show with meta and comedic commentary on the nature of sequels.

Fresh off their effective undercover work as high school students, Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) graduate to an assignment that sends them to college. Once again Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) tasks them with finding a drug supplier, but when it comes to social navigation, this time the script gets flipped. Schmidt was in his element in high school while Jenko failed to fit into the cool crowd. At Metro City State Jenko blends in easily, buddying up to quarterback and possible campus dealer Zook (Wyatt Russell). Schmidt struggles to make a positive impression on Zook and his fraternity brothers, leaving him to hang out with art majors like Maya (Amber Stevens), who lives with the girl whose former roommate’s death from the drug generated their investigation.

Whether it’s because duplicating the original film’s structure and plot points is the easiest option or the audience is anticipated not to care, 22 JUMP STREET spares no opportunity to point out the crass recycling in sequels. Like Schmidt’s hilarious stab at slam poetry at open mic night, itself a callback to his audition in the first JUMP STREET, the film deconstructs the very thing it’s engaging in. Winking acknowledgements of an unnecessary bigger budget and narrative repetitions avoid being cutesy excuses for screenwriting laziness because the ruthless jokes consistently hit their marks. In its own way 22 JUMP STREET is a work of film criticism that mocks the lack of originality in endeavors like this. When Jenko drills several holes in a small area for hidden cameras, it’s not unlike an industry that time and again mines a diminished number of established properties for box office returns.

Lord and Miller started as directors in animation with the TV series CLONE HIGH and moved on to films with CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS and THE LEGO MOVIE. They bring some of their cartoon sensibility to 22 JUMP STREET. An early action setpiece atop a moving truck turns the heroes into Looney Tunes made flesh, and a drug trip sequence places them side by side in exaggerated scenery for their contrasting experiences. Perhaps their work in animation explains why a significant amount of the humor is visual. Through editing and framing, sometimes in split screen, they compare Jenko and Schmidt’s vastly different physical abilities with amusing results. Jokes in the background, like a hall named after fonts and a sped-up chase in front of the Benjamin Hill Center for Film Studies, are there for viewers to discover than have hammered home. Lord and Miller assume a greater amount of audience perceptiveness than other broad comedies that repeat and explain jokes for the less engaged. Creed’s “Higher” plays during Schmidt’s bad trip, but it’s never pointed out, just left there for the viewer to pick up on the implication that it’s what is playing in hell.

Tatum and Hill have great comedic chemistry as the mismatched stud and schlub, and the performances are again a large part of the film’s appeal. Tatum in particular is endearingly funny playing a big dummy who mangles words like annals and carte blanche and tries on a ridiculous, pinched accent when called upon to follow Schmidt’s lead in a meeting with criminals. The verbal humor comes in flurries and is epitomized when Jillian Bell’s Mercedes works Schmidt like a speed bag with her quips about his age. Despite all of the wisecracks and visual gags, the funniest bit comes in a character-based scene at parents’ weekend. 22 JUMP STREET makes no bones about repeating what worked the first time around and suggests there could be an endless crop of installments. If this film series can continue to deliver more of the same consistent laughs, keep ‘em coming.

Grade: B

The Wolf of Wall Street

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

If THE GREAT GATSBY’s Nick Carraway arrived on Wall Street in the late 1980s and decided that the corruption and decadence was pretty awesome, he’d look something like Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.  Jordan starts out with notions of doing right by the clients while making money for his firm and himself, but his first day on the job he’s quickly disabused of such thinking.  As his boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) makes clear, they’re playing with other people’s money.  The point is to keep the investors’ cash in the game so they can keep getting their share via commission.

Jordan finds himself out of a job after the October 1987 stock market crash, but his fortunes take a marked upturn when he begins pitching penny stocks in a strip mall boiler room in the suburbs.  He’s a gifted salesman who knows exactly what to say to convince blue collar types to risk their hard-earned cash on companies unlikely to produce the returns he implies are possible.  The commission percentages are much higher on the garbage he’s selling than on the blue chip stocks, so it isn’t long before Jordan is earning fat checks and striking out on his own.

Jordan’s brilliant idea is to open his own brokerage house that lures wealthy investors with familiar investment options and then pushes a bunch of the crap stocks on them.  Jordan perfects the script that he teaches to his right hand man Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) and some old friends so they can land well-heeled clients.  The plan works like a charm.  Jordan rebrands the firm as the more legitimate-sounding Stratton Oakmont and moves them out of a former auto body shop on Long Island to offices in New York City’s financial district.    

For three hours director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter present enough bad behavior and language to make a proverbial sailor blush, yet by and large the illegal business practices, heavy drug use, and degradation of women is rewarded and mostly consequence-free.  Jordan and crew achieve their warped vision of the American dream because on some level society deems this acceptable, even if the ugly truths may be hidden from view.  Jordan lives the high life in the land of get mine rather than the land of opportunity, and Scorsese makes it look like a blast to be able to be bombed out of your mind on cocaine and quaaludes and enjoy all that money can buy, whether it’s purchasing a mansion, yacht, helicopter, and sports car or trading up from mousy wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) to lingerie-designing model Naomi (Margot Robbie).

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET has faced some criticism for making Jordan’s excessive and criminal lifestyle seem too attractive without condemning it, especially because this is based on a true story, but that’s precisely the point.  Jordan has what a lot of people want.  He’s just one of the few able to get it by exploiting get rich quick dreams.  It goes without saying that Jordan and associates are horrible people, but they’re the manifestation of a culture that confuses the pursuit of wealth with the pursuit of happiness.

Jordan and his employees are nothing more than con men operating under a more respectable banner. DiCaprio shines as a huckster whose disdain for his marks ignores the fact that he too has bought into the slick talk he uses to rip them off.  When Jordan gives savage inspirational speeches to his work force, DiCaprio comes off like a bright-eyed cult leader.  He’s very persuasive, yet his monologues seem designed to convince himself of the worthiness of his choices as much as they are to fire up the cold callers doing his bidding.  This puffery emerges in Jordan’s unreliable narration.  For instance, an amount of cash he claims was stolen from his Trump Tower apartment increases as he tells the story.  When Jordan is wrong or inconsistent with the details, it’s in service of building his own legend, which makes him more self-assured and more of an authority to those turning to him for guidance.

Jordan uses words to seduce, and DiCaprio relishes every one in his performance, whether he’s barking out motivational speeches or flirting with bribing an FBI agent.  DiCaprio hints at a wink behind everything Jordan says.  It’s as if he’s asking the rhetorical question “ain’t I a stinker” while beaming with pride at his ignoble accomplishments and actions.  DiCaprio also attacks the physical comedy with zest, particularly when Jordan crawls down a country club’s front steps to his car while incapacitated on powerful sedatives and engages in a slow motion chase of Donnie when he gets home.

Although THE WOLF OF WALL STREET places the spotlight on an unflattering portrait of individual and collective aspirations, Winter’s screenplay spots a lot of humor in the squalor and buffoonery.  All that’s missing is a laugh track to these men behaving badly.  The question is whether all that cackling is because of the idea that these slimeballs are to be envied and emulated or that there are so many suckers waiting to be bled dry.

Grade: A

21 Jump Street

21 JUMP STREET (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2012)

In 21 JUMP STREET new police officers Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) botch reading the Miranda rights to a suspect and are promptly reassigned to an undercover program.  They are to pose as high school students and find the the dealers and supplier of a synthetic drug already responsible for one kid’s death.

Although they became friends while training to be on the force, the mismatched cops were on opposite ends of the social spectrum when they went to high school the first time.  Schmidt was the geeky Eminem wannabe who excelled in academics and failed socially.  Jenko was the dumb jock lucky to be a graduating member of the class of 2005.

When Jenko confuses their assumed identities, they end up swapping positions on the social ladder.  Schmidt gets into the cool crowd and lets it go to his head while Jenko lands with the nerds and discovers the joy of using science to blow up things.

Other than the premise of supposedly young looking law enforcement officers going undercover as teenagers, 21 JUMP STREET isn’t terribly concerned with being faithful to the late ‘80s Fox television series it’s based on.  That’s not a problem, as the source material doesn’t require reverential treatment, and in fact the action-comedy is a lot more enjoyable since it doesn’t try to earn points by wallowing in nostalgia or replicate what preceded it.

Instead 21 JUMP STREET is a smartly stupid buddy comedy that plays with the ridiculousness of its set-up.  Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller and screenwriter Michael Bacall don’t ignore the elephant in the room--that Hill and Tatum couldn’t pass as teens--but gleefully point out the absurdities of the entire arrangement.  Lord and Miller co-directed the funny and inventive CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, and they’ve brought that animated film’s zany sense of humor to live action in a way that seems perfectly ordinary within a cartoonish situation.

Still, the best jokes are often rooted in small, everyday observations that come at Schmidt and Jenko’s expense.  They find today’s high school landscape foreign to the one they knew.  Their debate over how to wear a backpack--one strap or two?--and bewilderment at the different fashions and social conventions bring plenty to laugh at in the rapidity of changes in youth culture and adults trying to keep up with it.

21 JUMP STREET wouldn’t deliver as many big laughs as it does if Hill and Tatum didn’t commit so fully to looking dumb.  Hill throws himself into singing a song as Peter Pan in a drama club audition and trying to run a track relay while high as a kite.  Tatum’s lunkhead act amuses when words betray him, such as when he pronounces the abbreviation for AP Chemistry, and in the excitement he gets from hanging with the kids he would have snickered at when they were his peers.  Tatum was pretty funny in a small role in THE DILEMMA.  In 21 JUMP STREET he’s found a good way of playing against his looks for big comedic payoffs.  He and Hill make a fun tandem.

Grade: B