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 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 fantasy of 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 that the real object of his desire
may be the frat football quarterback Zook (Wyatt Russell), with whom Jenko has,
to use the romantic cliché, “so much in common,” we began to comprehend that at
the very center of this Lord-Miller concoction is not just the obvious tried
and true “bromance” that has become so popular in such commercial laugh
vehicles, but the understated truths upon which that genre is based. Here, for
one of the first times, cinema not only asks someone like me to “read between
the lines,” but demands it, depending upon everyone’s knowledge that the
central male figures of this tale, although not really homosexual, are living their lives as if they were gay.
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 simultaneously reciting
the same words, Schmidt and Jenko repeat the sketch by simultaneously spouting
words that are completely opposed—while 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 used 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
it truly doesn’t matter; in such an unlikely intensity of friendship they might
as well really be gay.
And then there’s the other man, Zook, with whom Jenko is able combine
those high school fantasies with those prepubescent sexual urges which he
apparently has never outgrown—despite the fact that it first appears that Zook
is behind the distribution of the potent drug. It’s not just a word game to
confuse the name Cate Blanchett, as does Jenko, with the word carte blanche (meaning the freedom to
act as one wishes).
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 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 most
gay movies might conjure up, 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 helicopter 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”) of 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
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2014).
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