22 Jump Street - Funnier than you would think

Having been pleasantly surprised by the amount that I enjoyed 21 Jump Street, it wasn't too difficult to decide upon the second film that I would watch on the long haul to Buenos Aires.  22 Jump Street is obviously the sequel to the reboot of the TV series, again starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill as a pair of douchebag cops who are drafted in to investigate a dodgy ring of drug dealers - this time on a college campus (last time it was in a school).

The running gag in the film is one that has carried over from the previous, and to be fair to the writers they've done a pretty good job of making something that could have been tedious into something funny.  The joke is that everything is the same as last time; playing on the idea that the sequel needs to be as similar to the first to appeal to the same audience.  In 21 Jump Street the gag was that everything happening was exactly the same as the TV series.  And it really is the same as last time, but somehow the postmodern acknowledgement of that isn't tedious, it's pretty funny.

I guess the thing that makes the film work is a combination of smart writing and excellent comic performances from Tatum and Hill - aided by Ice Cube ably bringing his performance as the archetypical 1980s style angry black police chief.  It's crude and not subtle in the slightest, but it's undeniably funny with its penis jokes, weird trips, lampooning of the buddy cop genre and general refusal to take itself seriously.  The film ends with a montage predicting future iterations of the xx Jump Street genre, with Hill and Tatum going to all sorts of schools and academies solving exactly the same crimes as they age and pretend to still be in their early 20s.  It's surprisingly funny as end-credit sequences go.

As this kind of stuff goes, it's no Bridesmaids, but it's definitely better than most.