Welcome to Rearview Mirror, a monthly movie column in which I re-view and then re-review a movie I have already seen under the new (and improved?) critical lens of 2022. I’m so happy you’re here.
Well folks, we finally found it: the Rearview Mirror-iest movie to ever be Rearview Mirrored. 21 Jump Street, a movie I went hard for just 10 years ago that has aged like milk.
It’s not Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s fault! This was when mid-budget filmmaking’s answer to the Avengers-ification of the box office was to make everything ’80s new again. Remember 2010’s Karate Kid starring Jaden Smith? Neither does Jaden Smith. So lemme refresh your memory.
2009: Fame, Friday the 13th
2010: The Karate Kid, The A-Team, A Nightmare on Elm Street
2011: Footloose, Arthur, Conan the Barbarian
2012: Red Dawn
2013: The Evil Dead
2014: The Equalizer, About Last Night, Endless Love, Robocop
Also in 2012: Jump Street, and the aforementioned Avengers, which wasn’t a remake, but was a tentpole so behemoth that it made even a goofy action-comedy based on a TV show look downright humble. (Also, having been directed by J*ss Wh*d*n, it hasn’t aged that great either, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.)
When I saw 21 Jump Street, I was charmed, delighted, absolutely amused. Obviously, I knew the plot going in: Young cops go undercover at a high school to sniff out drug dealers. But Lord and Miller, as they often do, put a clever spin on the central dynamic. The main duo, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, had been, respectively, a jock and a geek in high school, and even though they’d become friends on the force, they didn’t realize that some time around Obama’s election, what “cool” was had changed. In 2012, the kind and conscientious Hill is considered in, whereas Tatum’s ignorant macho shtick is out. Like in Never Been Kissed, the nerd gets a chance to relive high school as one of the popular kids, but with added kudos to the teens of today: they’re woke!
I recognized this dynamic. At my high school, it was very important to recycle, and slurs were a huge no-no. Lord and Miller totally got it! Tatum was so funny going cross-eyed on the hallucinogenic drug he was supposed to be tracking, and when the substance gives Hill the confidence to belt “I Gotta Crow” from Peter Pan, buddy, I tell ya, I cracked up. Thing is, in the 10 years since, everything flipped again. Cops, for starters.
In the movie, Hill and Tatum are sent to the Jump Street unit as a demotion after they blew an arrest by failing to inform a perp of his Miranda Rights. Not good back then, but absolutely cringe now. Modern audiences are skeptical of the police even when they do their jobs right. When they fuck up? Hard pass.
Sure, I kind of sound like a schoolmarm or a neocon picking apart the ways Ya Just Couldn’t Make 21 Jump Street Today, but the fact is that times change, and we can and should recognize that. Many of the central elements of this movie look different now than they did 10 years ago.
But OK, that’s an unavoidable part of the premise. You can’t have them be undercover firefighters or something. Then we get to the Brie Larson of it all. Turning on the movie this year, I could have sworn she played a popular young teacher or something, making her college-aged, because I remembered that she hooks up with Hill at the end. Then when it became clear that she was a high school student in a flirtation with Dave Franco, setting up a love triangle, I truly assumed I had misremembered. She and Hill become friends, they don’t kiss! Then around the start of the third act she very clearly tells the audience that she is, in fact, 18. And yep, there she is, kissing a 25-year-old just before the credits.
Now, look, it’s just a kiss, and it’s a movie. If a legal adult wants to put her mouth on another legal adult’s mouth, I’m not going to accuse anyone of promoting anything creepy because of it. Pro-pedo, the movie is not. But am I rooting for that couple? No, no I am not.
The third strike you could probably see coming from the title. In the climactic shoot-out, two side characters remove their prosthetics to reveal that they’re the stars of the ’80s show! There are actually cameos throughout, but you know the only one anyone cares about is Johnny Depp, The Nicest Guy In Hollywood According To This Article About Him Being In The Movie. Cut to 10 years later and he’s been replaced in that Harry Potter spin-off. Again, not Lord, Miller, Hill, or Tatum’s fault, but boy it just doesn’t work anymore.
I haven’t revisited the sequel, 22 Jump Street, which sees the characters do their thing in college. I remember it being funny and will simply assume it’s less problematic. And sure, I kind of sound like a schoolmarm or a neocon picking apart the ways Ya Just Couldn’t Make 21 Jump Street Today, but the fact is that times change, and we can and should recognize that. Many of the central elements of this movie look different now than they did 10 years ago.
Comedies always age unevenly. Styles of humor come and go, and the tensions that create jokes are sometimes just unfamiliar to modern audiences. Consider the many gay-panic jokes of ’90s and ’00s sitcoms. It was, back then, a truly amusing idea that two straight best friends might find themselves in a situation where they had to kiss. Ew! OMG! Now…who cares? (Lots of people, many in Florida, but on the whole I’d like to think we’re a more tolerant society.)
Even the drugs montage, which shouldn’t have been affected by the winds of politics, didn’t make me laugh as hard as it had in the theater. Contrast that with the mushrooms in Vegas sequence from 2007’s Knocked Up, which made me giddy last time I watched it. Maybe because in Jump Street, the trip follows a prescribed set of goofy phases, and in Knocked Up, the character arc influences the drug experience, not the other way around. It makes Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen introspective even as they freak out about chairs. And men having emotional crises will never go out of style. FL
