21 Jump Street (2012)
Directed by Phil Lord
When cops Schmidt and Jenko join the secret Jump Street unit, they use their youthful appearances to go undercover as high school students. They trade in their guns and badges for backpacks, and set out to shut down a dangerous drug ring. But, as time goes on, Schmidt and Jenko discover that high school is nothing like it was just a few years earlier -- and, what's more, they must again confront the teenage terror and anxiety they thought they had left behind.
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What critics say influenced 21 Jump Street
Reinserted as fake students at Sagan High School to investigate the teen drug trade (shades of 1958's "High School Confidential!")…
You can take the premise and revise the tone to match modern sensibilities; this was the option favoured by Michael Mann when he decided to update his own Miami Vice , or you can send up the original; attractive because it’s the cake and eat it option.
When Michael Mann reworked Miami Vice , he discarded much of what made it "hip" during its TV run and concentrated on the raw premise.
The backlash was due, at least in part, to the number of underwhelming franchise remakes that Hollywood has been churning out over the last few years (Miami Vice and Starsky and Hutch come to mind).
For nostalgic fans of the show, no fewer than three of its actors walk on here; sorry, but that sort of thing is what the too-serious Miami Vice film needed.
It’s kind of like “The Breakfast Club” only now Anthony Michael Hall is cooler then Judd Nelson.
Long gone are The Breakfast Club days of the jock, the brain, the princess, the criminal and the basket case.
That line nails high school more than anything in “The Breakfast Club.”
And so we have 21 Jump Street, which is based on the Fox series of the same name that ran from 1987 to 1991 and is now best known as the launching pad for Johnny Depp, who spent his early film career purposefully choosing oddball roles in films like Cry-Baby (1990), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Benny & Joon (1993) to distance himself from the teen pin-up idol the industry was trying to turn him into.
However, other would-be moviegoers were simply skeptical of how producers would handle the 21 Jump Street property – specifically fan-favorite character, Officer Tom Hanson, who was played by a pre-Edward Scissorhands Johnny Depp.
As part of their cover, the new 'brothers' move into Schmidt's parents' (Caroline Aaron, "Edward Scissorhands" and Joe Chrest), but when they're caught with expired hall passes by gym teacher Mr. Walters (Rob Riggle, "Big Miracle"), it's Schmidt's turn to freeze and their undercover identities are swapped.
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21 Jump Street is a far-distant, orphaned relative of the glorious Animal House (1978), which actually had terrific dialogue.
Because let’s be honest, for all its iPhone-viral-Facebook-invite-web-three-point-oh credentials, it’s basically Animal House shot handheld.
When it gets really interesting, 21 Jump Street becomes more like a dude-comedy remake of Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married, wondering what you’d do differently, if given a second crack at high school.
Martin Lawrence and Will Smith had this kind of chemistry in the “Bad Boys’’ movies, where Smith’s cool seemed to push Lawrence to some new unstable height.
The film may not quite be the ''Bad Boys meets John Hughes'' vehicle Hill reportedly first had in mind but it will do.
Star and executive producer Jonah Hill described the film as “an R-rated, insane, Bad Boys-meets-John Hughes-type movie”, and he’s not far wrong.
Indeed, they have, as even the idea of turning a decades-old television crime drama into a self-consciously wink-wink parody of itself was already done almost a decade ago with Starsky & Hutch (2004).
Another way is go about things the way Todd Phillips did with Starsky & Hutch : transform it into a comedy/parody.
What puts "21 Jump Street" ahead of the "Starsky & Hutch" movie a few years back, for example, is a simple matter of modesty and scale.
Like the equally irreverent film version of Starsky & Hutch , 21 Jump Street is less interested in recycling the conventions of the show it’s ostensibly adapting for the big screen than in exaggerating them for comic effect.
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And so we have 21 Jump Street, which is based on the Fox series of the same name that ran from 1987 to 1991 and is now best known as the launching pad for Johnny Depp, who spent his early film career purposefully choosing oddball roles in films like Cry-Baby (1990), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Benny & Joon (1993) to distance himself from the teen pin-up idol the industry was trying to turn him into.
Now Waters is back, once more drawing from the same well, with "Cry-Baby," hoping for even more commercial success this time by giving the lead to the teen heartthrob of the moment, Johnny Depp, of TV's "21 Jump Street."
In 1952, rockabilly greaser Cry-Baby (Johnny Depp, gently poking fun at his own 21 Jump Street teen idol status as a Wild One-inspired leather-and-Brylcreem stud) falls in love with blonde WASP Allison (Amy Locane), sparking a war between Cry-Baby’s gang of delinquent “drapes” and Alison’s former boyfriend’s group of “squares” For its first half, the film amusingly ridicules preppies, racists, devout religious zealots, and homophobes.
Depp is game to go where Waters leads, and his commitment to the part (boosted by a desire to shed his "21 Jump Street" teen dream label) is exactly what "Cry-Baby" needs to achieve a balance between cartoon and crazy.
This was the movie that convinced me, after months of ridiculing him for "21 Jump Street," that Johnny Depp could actually act.
Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) seem to be after the gentle irreverence of David Gordon Green's buddy flick Pineapple Express, but without his sensitivity and attention to character the movie quickly grows monotonous.
Like Pineapple Express —another drug-themed buddy comedy that coasted further than it should have on charm—21 Jump Street starts out stronger than it ends.
Take "Pineapple Express," for example--that film had a lot of blood and gunfire and bits of assorted brutality in them but they were never so graphic or extended that they threatened to overwhelm the proceedings.
For this is the very kind of dopily clever laugh-fest that Tropic Thunder almost was, and Pineapple Express should have been.
From there, comedy takes precedence over story cohesion, in the tradition of other recommendable narrative messes, including "Pineapple Express" and "Anchorman."