21 Jump Street thrives on the unexpected. In a hilarious early scene Schmidt and Jenko's roles are reversed, with the jock forced to pose as the nerd and the nerd posing as the jock. It embraces the stupidity of its concept too, by constantly acknowledging that Hill and Tatum are way too old to be posing as high school kids, or by having Ice Cube play the stereotypical black police captain from every 80s movie ever, and then outright acknowledging that. It's anything but a lazy cash grab, taking everything you know about buddy cop films and turning it on its head. In this way and many others, the movie is all about subverting your expectations, which based on this premise are probably very low. Early on, in a scene of dialogue that may as well have been delivered directly into the camera, a character explains that there aren't any original ideas these days and so we're stuck rehashing old concepts from the 80s to make a quick buck.
The World) seems to have realized nobody really cared about a 21 Jump Street movie and instead decided to make something totally different. While the TV show was primarily a drama, the film is essentially a satire of movies and shows like 21 Jump Street, fully aware of all of the clichés of its genre. Despite identical titles, I don't know if we can even call this an adaptation of the show. They're sent to a local high school undercover as students to investigate and bring down a drug ring.
After a failed drug bust, they're reassigned to a special division when their police station decides to "revive a cancelled program from the 80s" (get it?). When they realize each has something the other one needs, a friendship sparks and they become partners. Jenko was the popular jock while Schmidt was the unpopular nerd. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum star as Schmidt and Jenko respectively, two rookie cops who went to high school together, though belonging to different social circles. The result is a smart, exciting and often hilarious action-comedy with real stakes and a surprising amount of heart. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the team behind the brilliant and absurd Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, use the fact that nobody is too invested in the source material to their advantage, subverting all expectations for what a movie like this would be. As it turns out 21 Jump Street is barely an adaptation, and it isn't just an excuse to capitalize on an old concept. Was anyone really clamoring for that? Was there any reason to adapt that into a feature film in 2012? It sounds like just another example of Hollywood cashing in on an established franchise, akin to the decision to make a movie based on the board game Battleship. 21 Jump Street sounds like a terrible idea on paper: a big screen adaptation of an ABC TV series from the 80s.
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