REVIEW - 22 JUMP STREET (PHIL LORD AND CHRISTOPHER MILLER)

Through the looking glass as Hollywood executes its own, closely-monitored, session of sardonic self-reflection. The writers do a tidy job of keeping the meta elements confined to breezy, easily-identifiable markers, referenced incessantly though with such deftness that they don't become monotonous. These are potshots in plain sight (and close proximity), but the quips are succinct and successful, the scenarios apt. That 22 Jump Street is set on sending up its influences via extensive usage of stock themes and motifs is wise, not least because it prevents the film from becoming too abrasive and esoteric to win over its target audience, but it needn't have disproved its own comic theories by making said usage so extensive. For every gag aimed at the movie industry's franchise culture, there's a series of scenes unknowingly reliant on genre standards and on the content of this film's predecessor, 21 Jump Street. For every wry effort to acknowledge the political-incorrectness and social naivety of the many action-comedies that serve as a touchstone for it, 22 Jump Street can't help but revel in the inanity it thus only halfheartedly lampoons. By the unnecessarily elongated climactic sequence, the film's duelling desires have separated like cream from milk - violence and comedy not intertwined, but one interspersed with the other, the screenplay's signature self-awareness employed one moment, abandoned the next. It's also perhaps a bit too broad in that self-awareness, typically a comedic pursuit characterised by more refinement, though the first Jump Street film was one of a number to school general audiences in this now-popular trend, and there's little to be gained in understating it, not with this much at stake. Maybe that's the ultimate in-joke of 22 Jump Street. It pokes fun at the tradition of movie sequels being derivative of, more expensive than and worse than the first film, whilst following those very guidelines. But that's not just because it wants to. That's because it needs to, lest it fail to square up to that first film. And, ultimately, it does not.