PHIL LORD, CHRISTOPHER MILLER
Bil’s rating (out of 5): BBB.5. USA, 2014. Columbia Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, LStar Capital, Media Rights Capital, Original Film, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, Storyville, 75 Year Plan Productions, 33andOut Productions, JHF. Story by Michael Bacall, Jonah Hill, Screenplay by Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel, Rodney Rothman, based on the television series 21 Jump Street by Patrick Hasburgh, Stephen J. Cannell. Cinematography by Barry Peterson. Produced by Jonah Hill, Neal H. Moritz, Channing Tatum. Music by Mark Mothersbaugh. Production Design by Steve Saklad. Costume Design by Leesa Evans. Film Editing by Keith Brachmann, David Rennie.
They ended in a blaze of glory and are ready for more, but there’s no way they could still pass for high school students (if ever they could). Thankfully there are criminal cases involving college students that also need to be looked into, which is what Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are assigned to when a young woman falls to her death from her dorm building roof and a party drug called WhyPhy (Work Hard Yes! Play Hard Yes!) is connected to the incident. Tatum and Hill go undercover yet again, moving into a dorm room pretending to be brothers who have just enrolled, and it is not long before Tatum becomes the master of the Sorority hijinks, including new best friend Wyatt Russell, and Hill gets in with the nerds but also falls in love in with a gorgeous co-ed. Their adventures take them off campus to Mexico for Spring Break by the film’s conclusion, and here’s the most surprising thing about the entire operation: it never stops being funny, and thanks to a lack of the ill-fitting gross humour that marred the first one is even better than the original. Hill and Tatum have wonderful chemistry, with Hill never overplaying his deer-caught-in-headlights persona and Tatum’s breezy charm meshing with him as perfectly as they did the first time around. It never for a second pretends to be anything it’s not, and is easily digested until the climactic ending (and, following that, a hilarious credit sequence).
