The 2012 movie “21 Jump Street” is goofy and action-packed, starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill and complete with a cameo from the stars of the original 80s TV drama of the same name, Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise. Tatum and Hill rehashed the roles of youthful cops sent undercover as high school students, but the movie is more of a continuation than the remake it was marketed as.
I liked what Holly Robinson and her character, Officer Judy Hoffs, brought to the show, but no such character stole the limelight from Tatum and Hill. Robinson did have a cameo, however, and one in which she wasn’t discovered as an undercover cop and shot (which is more than can be said for Depp and DeLuise).
The first season of the TV show is really fun to watch, not in spite, but because of its insistence that high school kids have their sticky little fingers in the dirtiest of illegal dealings at all times. When the dweeby clarinet player, inexplicably tangled with a dangerous drug pusher, overdoses in a locker room in the second episode, I felt the real grit of the 80s settle on me.
Never mind that guns were regularly pointed directly at someone’s head, fired and nothing came of it. This was real.This wasn’t just the regular old streets—this was the streets of the 1980s.
The show tackles all aspects of American life at the time, with episodes about gay rights, drugs, religion, AIDS, teen pregnancy and abortion, rape, racism, foreign policy and other issues, all blanketed with teenage angst and feathered hair. Things gradually take a turn for dramatic as the series wears on.
Take the in-your-face racial tensions episode in the second season in which a black, female runner for a racially divided high school throws herself in front of a car mid-race to avoid the implications of having her white boyfriend’s baby. Spoiler: she lives to chastise the rest of the school from her hospital bed for their warped race relations and have her baby in defiance of the opinion of others.
Despite the mounting, soap-opera-like seriousness, it is mostly an entertaining, kitschy series to watch. If there’s only time in your busy 21st century life to watch one episode, make it the “Back from the Future” episode. It’s set in the future, as imagined by 1980s screenwriters, which I always find hilarious.
The episode reflects back on the past 3 and a half seasons of the show, by which time it had started running out of steam. Depp, along with his co-stars, was shown in full make-up as an octogenarian – looking a little like Miracle Max in “The Princess Bride” – telling his story to a baby-faced cop curious about the now-defunct unit.
The sequel to the film adaptation is set to start filming in 2013. I’m not hoping for much change besides a female co-star, and I expect lots more of what made the first movie fun.
