The problem is that the filmmakers wanted to be both charming and crude, and the results play like “School of Rock” meets “Bad Boys II,” complete with the spewing red stuff and freeway pile-ups (that ‒ wait for the joke ‒ never explode). Instead of “embracing their stereotypes,” as Dickson instructed, Jenko hangs with the nerds in band and honors chemistry and Schmidt swaggers unconvincingly as the popular jock.ĭirected by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”) from a kernel of an idea by Hill, also billed as executive producer, “21 Jump Street” isn’t as much of a stinker as “Bewitched” or “The Brady Bunch,” but it’s no “Starsky and Hutch” with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, either. In between, we get Schmidt and Jenko, their undercover personas reversed, struggling with their least likely subjects. Scrub that! Most of the film is in the teaser, from the set-up to the prom-night climax. Most of the best (read semi-funny) moments are in the teaser.

If you’ve seen the trailer for this fitful farce, you’re already ahead of me. and, as pretend brothers, expose whoever it is dealing a new synthetic hallucinogen. Their job: to “get in with the burnouts and popular kids” at Sagan H.S. Dickson (Ice Cube) and operated out of a derelict church at the address of the title. Relieved of park-patrol duty, they’re assigned to “a revived undercover program ‒ from the 1980s.” It’s run by the ever-apoplectic Capt. Though they ran in different circles in school, out of necessity they join forces on the force ‒ and prove twice as ineffectual.

Schmidt/Hill is the pudgy outsider, every bully’s delight Jenko/Tatum is Studly Do-Right, the handsome dunce. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum star as former high school classmates who, coincidence of coincidences, now find themselves classmates at the Police Academy. The latest in a seemingly endless slew of painful spoofs based on TV shows, “21 Jump Street” takes an OK premise ‒ two undercover cops get a second shot at making the grade in high school ‒ and milks it for an occasional chuckle before devolving into a succession of increasingly lame sketches.

21 jump street full movie age guide