21 Jump Street Brings Crude Humor with no Substance

Original Film, Rated R, running time 109 minutes

Recently I made my weekly trip down to Westgate Cinemas to view the new comedy movie 21 Jump Street that I have heard so much about. I watched the trailers and was expecting some raunchy humor and a story line that was not the best in the world, but what I got was a bit more than I bargained for. The humor was not too funny and more often than not a bit painful to watch and there was very little story to speak of. This movie was the number one grossing movie in theaters this weekend and quite honestly, I am not entirely sure how that happened.

21 Jump Street is an R rated comedy film directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller about two immature looking and acting cops who are transferred into the Jump Street division. Officers who work on Jump Street go undercover in a high school setting. Our two protagonists are sent to their old high school charged with the task of stopping the spread of a new designer drug that seems to be coming from the school. These two head back to high school for the first time in seven years to investigate this strange new drug.

I personally am not a fan of the raunchy and crude humor of modern R rated comedy movies, it is just not my thing, but that being said this movie was still not too enjoyable to watch. The acting was a bit of a letdown, not that I was expecting Academy Award winning stuff, and the characters seemed unimaginative and quite frankly, pretty dumb. Hill and Tatum play the roles of incompetent police officers well, maybe a bit too well as their characters came off as incredibly stupid, to the point that it was simply unpleasant to watch. Their antics were immature, dumb and not funny.

The style of humor of the film made it seem like this movie was made for a 16 year old sense of humor, but had much more crudeness and vulgarity than was honestly necessary. While crude humor is funny at times, this movie went a bit too far at times and while the first couple instances of the crude humor were funny, it died off rather quickly and just became painful to watch. I laughed a grand total of four times the entire two hours I had to sit in that theater and it felt as if I was watching a bad comedy movie on Comedy Central but was unable to turn the channel. If you have seen the trailer for this movie, then you have seen all the funny scenes of this film.

The story line of this film was so simplistic and fairly unimportant. I honestly do not think the directors really cared about any semblance of a story and focused on the “humor” that was found in the movie. While these police officers were charged with figuring out who was running this new synthetic drug ring, they were off reliving an alternate version of their high school careers where Hill is one of the cool kids at school and Tatum is stuck with the geeks and nerds. I am assuming this was supposed to add tension between the two and add something to the story line, but it failed to do so.  This movie’s story line was as much of a story line as one would expect from a Jonah Hill movie, simplistic and not at all the focus of the film.

Maybe it is just me and my style of humor, but I can honestly say that I did not enjoy this movie what so ever. It was entirely too immature and crude for my tastes and had I been watching it on television then I would have changed the channel long before the end. It was nothing but raunchy humor with no story line to back it up and while I love the occasional dumb comedy, this was not enjoyable to watch. I cannot give this movie any higher than a D because, in a movie where they forsake the story for the humor, neither were good. If you want to see a stupid comedy movie with humor made for 16 year olds then this is the movie for you, otherwise stay away from this film and wait until it airs on TV.