Generally speaking, sequels can be really awful. However, as seen in some movies today, sequels are getting better, or at least more popular. Creators are using a second movie to explore new plots and deepen relationships in a film that can stand alone without much background information from the first movie, but that wasn’t always the case. There’s a reason that “the first movie was better” is such an immediate response to most sequels. Many sequels follow a formula of “same drink, different glass,” which means that they are the same movie and story, just presented in a slightly different way.
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22 Jump Street takes that formula and goes a step further, doing the exact same story in the exact same way, but ironically. Because of the extreme similarities, it can be easy to group 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street together as one, but 22 Jump Street deserves a little more credit than that for its clever, metatextual take on sequels.
21 Jump Street
Columbia Pictures
Remember 21 Jump Street? Not the television show from 1987 to 1991, starring Johnny Depp, but the movie from 2012. Schmidt (Jonah Hill) was the high school dork and Jenko (Channing Tatum) peaked in high school as a jock; afterwards, they join forces in the police academy, so they can be underachieving bike cops together.
After an inevitable mistake, they are put on an undercover job where they pretend to be high school students with strict orders to “infiltrate the dealers, find the suppliers” of a dangerous new synthetic drug, and they do just about everything but that. They get their roles mixed up, Schmidt ends up cool, in a play, and falling for a teenager while Jenko gets AP classes, nerd friends, and a hefty dose of karma. They fight, make a lot of mistakes, accidentally do the dangerous new synthetic drug, take part in some comically bad action scenes, and eventually get the job done, but almost by chance. Many people would think you only need to see that sequence play out once, and they would be wrong.
Why 22 Jump Street Is a Better Sequel Than You Remember
This sequel isn’t like others, because it is intentionally and ironically doing the exact same thing as the first time, mocking other franchises that do it along the way. What franchises? The likes of Ghostbusters II, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Hangover Part II are all shameless offenders of “same drink, different glass,” but they try to do it earnestly. That’s where they go wrong. In a postmodern world where films can be ironic, why would they be earnest? It is just not right to name a sequel Die Hard 2: Die Harder if it’s not a comedy. That’d be like naming a sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious. Wait, they did that as well.
Unlike these other sequels, 22 Jump Street doesn’t masquerade as original or earnest, it just doubles down on the stupidity everyone loved from the first movies with a new undercover case and more mistakes. When Schmidt and Jenko are being given their undercover assignment, the captain (Ice Cube) tells them, “Just do the exact same things as before,” which is what viewers didn’t even know they needed, but they did. This setup allowed for countless callbacks to the first movie and let writers focus on writing ridiculously funny jokes instead of worrying about something silly like the plot.
Plot Twists We Could’ve Seen Coming
Despite their clever idea to do the same thing intentionally, there were a few changes and plot twists throughout the movie that solidified it as the sequel to see. Roles in this movie return to the natural order, rather than being swapped. Jenko hangs out with the jocks and Schmidt falls in with an artsy crowd, even getting up to do slam poetry about a dead student he never knew. In the first movie, the bad guy was a popular student, so with a little research, Schmidt is sure Jenko’s new jock friend Zook is the supplier, but as the first person to “go to college” in his family and the fact that he is actually fitting in this time, Jenko will not even entertain the idea. Unsurprisingly, Schmidt falls for another girl (but this time of legal age), named Maya, and they get together only to find out the girl he slept with is the captain’s daughter.
Knee-deep in bigger tomfoolery, funnier jokes, stronger characters, and slightly better action scenes, these goofy heroes eventually infiltrate the dealers and find the suppliers, but it’s not anyone they could’ve guessed. The dealer is Maya’s roommate, who slid under everyone’s radar by being so insufferable to be around; Schmidt ignored her as best he could, only to find out that if he would’ve been a little more attentive this would’ve been an open-and-shut case. Once again, Schmidt is the smart one but misses what’s in plain sight. But alas, the movie comes to a close with action, screw-ups, a fast car, grenades, and the good guys winning again, but still nearly accidentally.
The real closer of the movie is the credits. As the movie comes to a close, Schmidt and Jenko are approached and asked to go undercover at a medical school which launches into posters for 22 subsequent fictional sequels, an animated series, a video game, and a toy line, nailing down the absurdity of how many sequels they could make if they felt like it.
21 Jump Street Is Streaming on Starz, but What’s Next?
There have been discussions to get the gang back together and make another movie. There were rumors about making it a collaboration with Men In Black, but after proving too difficult, they scrapped that idea and the idea of 23 Jump Street altogether, deciding it’s been long enough that they should just pick up at 24 Jump Street. If another movie came out of this franchise, would it follow suit and be even more ironic than 22 Jump Street? It just might, but in the meantime, 21 Jump Street is available to stream on Netflix and 22 Jump Street can be found on Starz and streaming platforms that allow Starz for a subscription, like Hulu, Prime Video, and The Roku Channel.
