laughing before you tell the joke
by Douglas Messerli
Michael
Bacall, Oren Uziel, and Rodney Rothman (screenplay), Phil Lord and Christopher
Miller (directors) 22 Jump Street /
2014
Sometimes—if
nothing else to demonstrate to those who love popular culture as much as I
don’t, that I’m still living—I review films that seem out of the bounds of my
taste. My spouse Howard insisted the other day that I accompany him, for his
second viewing, to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s redo of their previous
comic success, 22 Jump Street.
Although I attempted to dissuade him from demanding my participation, I know
that when he bows his head in stubborn insistence, claiming that I never share
things he enjoys, that I best hang up my high hat and go along with my
endurance-tested grin.
When he asked, when the movie came to a
close, “What did you think?” I fantasized I would answer “Well, I’m just not
that much into adolescence.” Fortunately, neither are the directors of this
manic comedic event. Of course, they actually are very much into both
adolescent behavior and the well-worn humor it elicits. But, as they do with
nearly every aspect of their purposely predictable sequel, they make quick fun
of it and themselves ahead of time just so, if nothing else, they can flow
guiltlessly forward. True, sometimes they overplay their self-parody to such a
degree that it almost wears one out; one more line about how the police honchos
(read studio heads) wanted a complete redo of 21 Jump Street (a movie which I did not see, but probably should
have before dipping into what will surely now become a franchise, a fact which
the movie again satirizes at the other end of its reel), I feared I might have
to excuse myself for a trip to the john. But then, exaggeration is also on this
movie’s bucket list, beginning with its first failed caper, where the absurd
undercover police duo, Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing
Tatum), attempt to arrange a sale of illegal goods with the villainous Ghost
(Peter Stormare), an act of such momentous failure that it results in an
octopus being flung into Schmidt’s face, and, with cartoon-like comic
conclusion, the two being hit head on by the bar of a crane, toppling them from
the roof of a semi-truck. If the scene is funny, it almost serves, more
importantly, as a kind of preview-warning: yes, this duo is bound for lots of
such dumps, but we won’t show you anything else quite as stupid as this.
The couple—or in their undercover jargon,
“the bros”—instead, are sent off to college, this time, instead of to a correspondence
institution, to a “real” university where they will be asked to play, as
unbelievably as possible, two freshmen. That they are “narks” is immediately
apparent to everyone except for themselves. “I’m the first one in my family to
pretend to go to college,” gushes Jenko.
Their mission, now that they have
accepted it, is to find out who is the on-campus drug dealer selling a new
version of what appears to be a kind of super-active Speed, WHYPHY, which
offers an intensely cogent four hours before letting those who ingest it down
with a bang so powerful that it has killed a young coed. When the two cops
accidently check out its potency, they end up in split-screen dreams, Schmdit,
predictably, locked into a weird alien landscape while Jenko skips and dances
(in Magic Mike-like swivels) within a
pleasant sunlit pasture, determined, at one point, to join the white puffs of
cumulus clouds.
The campus location allows the writers and
directors a wide range of opportunities to offer up a whole series of predictable
institutional objects of derision, including student dorm accroutements, poetry-slams, fraternities, sports, and sexual
misconduct that has existed for even before the time-honored Animal House. Fortunately, the creators
of 22 Jump Streets seem to find many
of these jabs at higher education a bit passé, and quickly drop their spoofs
almost before they have revealed them.
Schmidt easily scores with the beautiful
former roommate of the over-drugged girl, Maya (Amber Stevens), who just
happens to be police chief Captain Dickson’s (Ice Cube) daughter and,
fortunately without even winking, Black. But Jenko’s love interest is far more
interesting. If at first we are led to believe that he has met up with his
boyhood fantasyof playing football—this film’s central joke about adolescent
infatuations—we soon discover that the directors have something else up their
sleeves. And as quickly as we perceive
Not only do the “brothers” continuously
suggest that the relationship of two heterosexual opposites (which critic
Manola Dargis correctly characterized as Tatum’s verticality perfectly balanced
with Hill’s sphericality) is something other than it seems—in one scene with
the hilarious twin brothers Yang, attempting to demonstrate their commonality
by simultaneous reciting the same words, Schmidt and Jenko repeat the sketch by
simultaneous spouting words that are complete opposed—but they, intentionally
and unintentionally play a loving couple on the verge of a breakup and makeup
throughout the film. If at first this may seem to be just another way of
satirizing “faggots”—the word Ghost uses to describe the couple who, caught
spying in the library, pretend to be engaging in oral intercourse—in the end,
both writers and actors convince so effectively in the sincerity of their on-screen
relationship that, in the end, it truly doesn’t matter; in such an unlikely
intensity of friendship they might as well really be gay.
The film has great fun with the two men’s
intense weight-lifting workouts which sound (at least over Schmidt’s snooping
hookup) more like sex than sex. When the two complete a football pass, they are
appear to be more satisfied than any coupling beasts.
Let us just say that in 22 Jump Street the writers have created
more metaphors for male sexuality than any gay movie might even have imagined,
strangely anchoring their work in this easy-to-manipulate trope. Which makes it
even stranger, it seems to me, that not one critic I read, despite their
reference to “bromances,” actually defined the patently obvious content of the
movie. If nothing else, films like 22
Jump Street reveal conclusively that times have changed. What used to be
suggestive content or even outright raunchy, is now, clearly what sustains and
makes this movie so very likeable.
By work’s end, after miraculously
uncovering the real drug dealer, Maya’s roommate Mercedes (Jillian Bell)—whom
Schmidt violently encounters in a series of slap and punches that hint at yet
another possible sexual possibility in its S&M-like pushings and pullings—and
saving the day through one more outrageous gay sexual grope (Jenko is forced to
reach up and into the pants of his “bro” in order to pull out a grenade he tosses
up into the heliocopter from which they are hanging [I promise, it’s really what
happens!]) our two action heroes kiss and make up, having, as they put it, gone
down in the annals (pronounced “anals”) history—cartoon history at least). Even
Zook recognizes the inevitability of their (and perhaps our) love emanating
from their frictional bonding.
I wouldn’t go so far to suggest that 22 Jump Street, as does San Francisco Chronicle film reviewer
Mick LaSalle, could be a cultural event that, over time, might be seen like the
French film critics’ later recognition of the works of Howard Hawks and Alfred
Hitchcock. For me, this postmodern jumble more closely resembles the
precociously pre-postmodern “road movies” of another odd duo, Bing Crosby and
Bob Hope—even if surely it would only bring groans from the young audiences
gurgling at the antics of Hill and Tatum. Or then again, it reminds me a bit of
the humor of long-dead comedian, Red Skelton, who often laughed at his jokes
before he told them.
Los Angeles, July
6, 2014
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