21 Jump Street - Jonah Hill's not bad then

I'm not entirely sure where I've got the impression from that Jonah Hill films are the sorts of films that I should avoid. The only film he's been in that I had actually seen was Moneyball (pretty good) and it's only from films I assume are bad that I get the impression he must be terrible (Get him to the Greek, Superbad). This review is essentially about me realising I had made a mistake in pigeon-holing Hill, and serves as a reminder to keep an open mind about film.

I have no idea why I put 21 Jump Street on my Lovefilm list. When I tell you the plot you might understand why. Jonah Hill (Schmidt) and Channing Tatum (Jenko) play a pair of useless green cops who get sent on an undercover assignment to infiltrate a high school where someone is dealing a new type of drug. Their boss for this assignment will be Ice Cube of NWA fame. Schmidt and Jenko knew each other in school, Schmidt was the classic nerd while Jenko was the classic jock - and they hated each other.  Now they're going back to school together, and who knows - when Jenko has to pretend to be a science nerd and Schmid has to do drama and run on the track they might finally see the world from each others' point of view and grow as people.

Sounds a bit crap doesn't it? Well that's what I would have thought, but someone at some point must have told me otherwise - and I'm glad they did. 21 Jump Street is in fact a funny, tongue-in-cheek slapstick comedy that spends a lot of time making fun of its own genre. Not only making fun of the buddy cop / high school stereotypes it portrays, but also the fact that it's a film adaptation of a 1980s television production. There are a lot of references to this "being done in the 80's" and how people are running out of ideas these days. The funniest bits of the film are the parts where things keep on not exploding. Such as a car crashing into an oil tanker on a bridge which - after several set-up cuts establishing the plethora of cameras waiting to capture the awesome special effect - doesn't explode. As Jenko drives away from the scene at full speed he quips "I really thought that one would explode". There's also a brilliantly observed moment after we briefly see an unlikely threesome at a house party that reminded me of the genius "fucking hell" moment from Father Ted's King of the Sheep Competition.

I'm not going to pretend that 21 Jump Street is entirely devoid of scatological humour, far from it in fact as the IMDB's parental guide points out in mind-bending detail. It includes 123 uses of the word fuck - that's once every 53 seconds. The film doesn't totally rely on that for laughs though, and as such I'm happy to let the moment when Rob Riggle attempts to pick up his own severed penis with his teeth pass as a misjudged scene in an otherwise decent comedy. Next time Jonah Hill writes something, I'll be paying it more attention.