movies 21 Jump Street HHHH
H
alfway through this affable, inspired grab bag of a comedy, it hit me that what I was watching wasn’t merely a good movie but the Greatest TV Adaptation Ever Made. OK, the bar wasn’t exactly high. Nonetheless, cowriters Jonah Hill and Michael Bacall deserve credit for their discovery that the secret to success in this genre is keeping the source material’s title and premise, then losing everything else that made it a hit way back when. 21 Jump Street is likely to prove all but unrecognizable to anyone who remembers the late-’80s television series on which it’s based. As directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs), the film is very much an Age of Apatow exercise, a cinematic tossed salad of raunch, drugs, pop-culture parody and unabashed warmth. While I never saw the TV show, I am fairly sure it had fewer penis jokes. Hill costars with Channing Tatum, an actor not known for his comedic gifts. One of the movie’s many pleasant surprises, as it turns out, is that he’s a natural. The two play rookie cops assigned to an undercover operation. As their supervisor — Nick Offerman
from “Parks and Recreation” — explains, “The police have run out of new ideas. All they can do is recycle crap from the ’80s and hope nobody notices.” Their assignment: masquerade as high school students and find the source of a dangerous new recreational drug (“It’s killing white kids, so people care”). The notion that Hill and Tatum could pass for teenagers is hilarious, and the movie has a lot of fun with that preposterousness. Funnier still is the idea that they could be brothers, but that’s the boneheaded ruse their supervisors concoct. Hill is supposed to be Brad, an overachieving dweeb, while Tatum’s planned secret identity is Doug, ladies’ man, star athlete and straight-F student. But, just as he can never quite manage to memorize the Miranda rights, he spaces out in the principal’s office on their first day and gets it backward. Which works out just great for Hill’s character. He gets to relive high school as one of the popular kids. His partner finds himself in equally unfamiliar territory — namely, AP chemistry. The script mines the mix-up for maximum laughs. My favorite sequence follows the cops’
class act Hill and Tatum are a hoot and a half as twentysomething cops who jump at the chance to give high school a second try.
initial encounter with Eric (Dave Franco), the ecology-minded teen drug lord. He agrees to sell them each a hit as long as they take it then and there to prove they’re not narcs. The subsequent 20 minutes are the most gut-busting I’ve seen on screen since Bridesmaids. Hill’s kite-high track meet is an instant classic, and I loved the Limitless-inspired bit in which, peaking on the mind-altering substance, Tatum strides up to a whiteboard, slashes numbers on it feverishly and throws down his marker, shouting, “Fuck you, science!” Upon which the camera zooms in on his creation, a maniacally scrawled jumble of 4s. The movie offers lots of equally surreal moments, and its pacing is a thing of beauty. There isn’t a dull patch. Bacall and Hill demonstrate consummate mastery in blending disparate tones and themes. One minute 21 Jump Street ruminates on how the high
school experience has changed over the past decade. (Tatum misses the good old days when dumb jocks ruled and blames the triumph of sensitivity on “Glee.”) The next, the film spoofs action-movie conventions, as in the highway chase throughout which nothing that would normally blow up agrees to blow up. Of course, it’s also one hell of a love story. And I’m not talking about the borderlinewrong crush between Hill and an underage student (Brie Larson). The real attraction here is between Brad and Doug. The movie takes bromance to new heights, in the process illustrating with a loopy brilliance precisely what’s so funny about police, love and understanding. R i c k K i s o nak
68 MOVIES
SEVEN DAYS
03.21.12-03.28.12
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reviews Friends with Kids HHHH Some viewers seem very bothered by the premise of Friends with Kids. But, if you aren’t offended by the deep-rooted cynicism of its protagonists, Jennifer Westfeldt’s directorial debut is the rare “romantic comedy” that qualifies as both funny and adult. It’s also, just marginally, romantic. Westfeldt and Adam Scott play Julie and Jason, two thirtysomething New York professionals who have been best friends for so long that the thought of getting physical or romantic with each other, à la When Harry Met Sally..., just grosses them out. They snark about their failed relationships and roll their eyes at couples who bring shrieking toddlers into restaurants ... until their mutual friends start having kids, too. Watching as child rearing turns formerly happy duos into stressed-out antagonists, Julie and Jason diagnose the problem with a naïveté worthy of adolescents. Romance, they decide, is incompatible with reproduction. The best way to breed is with a trustworthy coparent — such as a best friend — so one will never have to bicker with one’s True Love (who will surely happen along at some point) about who’s on diaper duty. None of this would have sounded that
strange to people born centuries ago, back in the days when marriage and love were seen as oil and water. But it certainly does to the pair’s friends and relations, when they learn that Julie and Jason are putting their theory in practice. Is he impregnating her because he “feels sorry” for her? Will their son be scarred by the spectacle of his friend-parents dating other people? Soon we find out, and, as always in comedy, the best-laid plans go decisively, but not tragically, awry. Friendship is hard to fake on film — perhaps even harder than sexual chemistry — and the movie’s greatest strength is that its characters seem to enjoy each other’s company. Westfeldt and Scott share a wry, neurotic humor that compensates for his notso-ideal casting as a callous playboy ad man. (Scott has carved out a small-screen niche as a more endearing Woody Allen type; his TV girlfriend, Leslie Knope, would be startled to hear about him dating Megan Fox in this film.) Maybe the role of Jason was originally intended for Jon Hamm, who plays one of the couple’s friends, along with three more Bridesmaids alumni: Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd. They all interact in relaxed, funny, natural ways, while the more
strange bedfellows Scott and Westfeldt play friends with zero interest in “benefits” — until they decide to reproduce together.
stereotypical characters — played by Fox and Edward Burns, as Julie’s love interest — get shorter shrift from Westfeldt’s screenplay. Some have charged that the film is antifamily, but it’s premised on Julie and Jason’s desire to have kids. It’s their desire to have everything — except angst or mess — that ends up seeming pretty immature. Westfeldt could have developed this theme better; a scene where the couple wow their skeptical friends with their mellowness and poise in dealing with an infant comes dangerously close to supporting their thesis that romance is what poisons family and vice versa.
But the other shoe drops when Julie and Jason start dating their “perfect” partners. The deeper they get into their bold relationship experiment, the more they realize, inevitably, that friendship can be as difficult to negotiate as any other kind of love. There’s nothing shocking about that discovery, or about where it leads. What is shocking is that Friends with Kids manages to confront a few hard truths on its way there. In a genre where pink-tinged fantasy fulfillment is the norm, that’s an experiment I can get behind. Marg o t H arri s o n