22 Jump Street

Every once in a while a movie leaves me groping for a new word to describe the awfulness of it. Grim? Gruesome? Not quite bad enough. Jaw-droppingly, synapse-shatteringly, bone-breakingly, head-explodingly, bowel-looseningly, I’d-rather-get-ebola-than-watch-this-again awful? That comes close, I guess. Here’s an example of how bad it is: The end credits were far funnier than anything that came before.

The first one, 21, was fairly funny, so I figured I’d take a chance on this one. After all, the reviews of this piece of shit were actually better than for 21. (Which leaves me wondering about the state of films, and of critics, in the 21st century.) Every joke is hammered into the ground. There is absolutely no sense of comic timing. Scene after scene left me gaping in disbelief. People think this shit is funny?

The few chuckles to be had all concerned the awareness that this was a movie. During the middle chase (there are three major ones, the last in split-screen) Our Guys are lamenting about how much all this destruction is costing “the department,” which we all know means “the studio.” And they even manage to fuck that up. There is a big fight scene between the fat one (I forget his name and won’t bother to look him up) and a girl. Whaling away at each other with their fists. Suddenly one of them stops and says “This is the scene when we suddenly kiss, isn’t it?” “No, I don’t want to kiss you!” Could have been funny. But the scene carries on about twenty times longer than it needs to be, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, gaining no comic ground, repeating all the lines until I thought I was gonna puke.

And then we got to the end credits (after discussing at least three times if we should just check out of this steaming pile of turds), and finally, some wit. There was a promo for 23 Jump Street (which is actually listed at the IMDb, no surprise), and then 24 Jump Street, and onwards from there. With clips and poster art, each introduced by Ice Cube snarling that he’s going to send them to this school or that. Every kind of school you can imagine: culinary school, flight school, Sunday school. They work their way up to 39 Jump Street before they’re through, video games, action figures, the whole magillah. And it’s funny. Too bad it came after about 107 minutes of crap.