21 Jump Street Gets Its First Non-Positive Review--Out of 22. No Longer a Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score...
Andrew L. Urban:
Urban Cinefile 21 JUMP STREET: Cannibals continue to roam in Hollywood (Hollowood?); their latest victim is a police procedural TV series from the 80s, in which young cops investigated crimes in high schools and colleges. Turning it into a juvenile cop comedy has been less than successful, even though there are some good lines, a few well conceived scenes and an underlying buddy movie beating heart. Too immature and juvenile in its taste to appeal outside a narrow 18 - 24 demographic, 21 Jump Street is a cacophony of high school humour, smeared on with endless expletives and genital references (not too funny, either)….
I do acknowledge that some will find it amusing for its crassness and the exploits of the two hapless gorks Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum). There are some fine comedic ideas swirling about, but they fail to overcome the laborious nature of the storytelling. Worst of all, with everything up for comedic grabs, there is no sense of reality to intrude on the story or characters - although Jonah Hill does make a reasonably tangible character out of Schmidt, an overweight, good hearted, soft centred and insecure young man with inbuilt adolescence….
21 Jump Street [is] the movie we had to have when the TV series should have been enough. There is also a surprise best discovered for yourself.
Louise Keller:
Jumping on the bandwagon of revamping old TV shows, this big screen version of the show from the late 80s/early 90s that is mostly remembered as being a springboard for Johnny Depp's career, is a slap-dash buddy movie with a puerile streak…. The humour is pretty lame, so leave your brain at the door, but there are some funny juxtapositions - like the stretch limo chase scene and the madcap sequence in which Hill, dressed like Peter Pan and Tatum, dressed like a chemical equation are making their escape from a gang of bikies…. It's not funny enough, inventive enough, or entertaining enough to make a difference, but the idea that the two unlikely buddies rub off on each other positively is not all bad.
