22 Jump Street is, first and foremost, a sequel about sequels. Reprising his role as Deputy Chief Hardy at the beginning of the film, Nick Offerman delivers the equivalent of studio notes to Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) after their attempt at a slightly more standard drug bust goes wrong: "Do the same thing as last time!" It's a refrain that continues throughout the movie as the dynamic-ish duo goes undercover again, this time as college students.

Schmidt and Jenko are using their old sibling aliases and are still living together, this time in a dorm rather than with Schmidt's parents. They're still looking to bust a designer drug ring, with the new product in question being WHYPHY, a combination of Adderall and ecstasy. And one of them gets a little too caught up in the life he's faking, only this time it's Jenko, who tearfully notes, "I'm the first person in my family to pretend to go to college."

How much of an obligation a sequel has toward being more of the same, only bigger, is an ongoing concern of 22 Jump Street. The movie even includes a hilariously unlikely in-universe explanation for its title and at one point suggests a character's probably the villain solely based on his being the rough equivalent of the villain in the first movie. (He's not, and 22 Jump Street actually manages to quite deftly balance being a sequel with being a movie in its own right.)

It's a self-mocking tendency that reaches brilliance during the closing credits, which I won't spoil other than to note that if 22 Jump Street willed itself into existence with the throwaway punchline of the first film, then the jokes that make up the end of the second suggest Schmidt and Jenko are destined to be around for a long time.