This movie really was not as bad as I was expecting.It was by no means a great movie, but I was expecting something downright terrible. Jonah Hill’s humor has never really resonated with me. Iâ€™ve always looked at him as the fat insecure Dane Cook of the comedy world.Â Â Now, I had all the reason in the world to believe this movie was going to be bad. The track record for TV shows from the 80s being made into successful films is pretty grim: Miami Vice, Starsky and Hutch, and finally A-team. So when I first heardÂ 21Â jumpÂ street was coming down the pipeline, I naturally wanted to flush twice and hope it went away. But it didnâ€™t.Â Then they go and cast Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill. On there best days I can ignore them, but most of the time they are a tireless drain on the movie going experience.Â Â And with Tatumâ€™s â€œthe Vowâ€ and Hills â€œthe Babysitterâ€ still freshly burned into our minds,Â 21Â JumpÂ Street looked like a recipe for all sorts of disaster.

The basic premise is that a new synthetic drug has found its way onto a highschool campus, with no leads as to the dealers or the supplier. The police decide to resurrect an old undercover project from the 80s and send cops into the school disguised as students. The cops chosen are a couple of buffoonish wannabe cops who are too wrapped up in wanting to appear to be cops, rather than actually being cops. We look at that premise and we see where the badness will start. It sounds like the same, boring, lazy screenwriting weâ€™ve come to expect from the Hollywood movie-making machine. Take and old idea, add some new pop culture references rinse and repeat. Then I noticed that Jonah Hill, besides starring in this film, co-wrote the screenplay as well.

This got me thinking. The whole reason 21 Jump Street is not a heaping pile of garbage is that at least every 3 minutes or so someone said or did something so outrageous or outlandish that you couldnâ€™t help yourself from chuckling. Not sustained laughter mind you, but quite a few little individual laughs to get you through.Â Â So what I think happened is that Jonah Hill got a hold of the original script, which was just the lame same old re-hash Hollywood has been giving us for the past few years, sat down with a red pen and added in the funny. Sure this probably took a relatively tame script and turned it into a R-rated movie, but in all honesty, the script needed it. I think itâ€™s this reason alone that will bring the movie success at the box office. It is totally a movie for guys to go to on a weekend with there buddies and just get a few laughs. Not much good for anything else, but it will suffice for that.

Conclusion: Matinee

Until next time…

See you at the theater!