21 Jump Street is a 2012 action-comedy movie that I discovered by accident. It has a distinctive goofiness that generates laughs without regard for artistry or plausibility, and its bold twists on traditional cinematic tropes give audiences something different.

21 Jump Street is an action-comedy film released in the United States in 2012, and I discovered it by accident. Wanting to watch a geeky movie, I typed in the keyword “nerdy movie” into Google. I hit enter, and today’s movie of the day, 21 Jump Street, was at the top of the search bar.
Trusting Google’s intelligence 100%, I blindly watched 21 Jump Street, and it was indeed a dumb movie. Of course, there are two kinds of dumb movies. There are two kinds of dumb movies: the ones that make you laugh at the absurdity of it all, and the ones that make you laugh because they’re truly dumb. 21 Jump Street is definitely in the latter category.

A rebellion against stereotypical characters and inauthenticity

People who think that a well-made movie has artistic merit, great acting, a solid screenplay, and deep themes will probably call it trash if they see it. Because this movie doesn’t satisfy any of the above lists.
All else aside, the movie’s screenplay is neither solid nor new. The movie opens with the two main characters, Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill), in high school. Jenko is an athlete and Schmidt is a student, and they spend their high school years very differently, but they both miss the prom. After graduation, the two meet again at the police academy and suddenly become best friends, each filling in for the other’s weaknesses. They go undercover as high school students at a 21 Jump Street high school where a new drug epidemic is raging, and their high school life is the exact opposite of their past. Through this life, Jenko and Schmidt are able to heal their past wounds and complete their mission to arrest the drug supplier.
If you think about the plot in isolation, the setup of characters healing past wounds through present work is very clichéd, and the development of events flows arbitrarily without any logic, so the structure is very sloppy. But strangely enough, these clichéd characters and disregard for logic make the movie a more sophisticated dumb movie.
Before I go on to talk about “nerd movies,” a quick note on what “nerdiness” is: nerdiness is a code of laughter that can be triggered by the imbalance of deviations in certain cultural elements. For example, the music of UV, a comedian duo with comical lyrics attached to a very serious melody, is a cultural disparity in form and content that causes the listener to laugh, and the public calls it “goofy”.
The two main characters of the movie are the protagonists of a very ordinary coming-of-age drama. Schmidt, a high school nerd, overcomes his past traumas by becoming a successful flyer on undercover missions, while Jenko, who never studied, works as a member of the chemistry club on undercover missions and even plays a big role in solving the crimes later in the movie using chemical formulas. If you look at it this way, you would never find a nerd in either character. However, the director applies the principle of goofiness here. He puts these serious coming-of-age drama characters in the middle of comical situations.
For example, Schmidt, a studying nerd, never has the courage to shoot a criminal, but at the end of the movie, he shoots his drug supplier. However, Schmidt’s bullet hits the killer’s penis and cuts off his penis. At this point, Schmidt is very happy that he’s overcome his trauma, while the killer is frantically searching for his severed penis. It’s a gross example, but Schmidt’s sincerity in celebrating his own growth in the midst of such a ridiculous situation makes the audience laugh at his nerdiness. And the serious BGM that plays over the top of this ridiculous situation adds to the fun.

Bold variations on form

As we’ve mentioned before, the movie’s improbable plot turns into a source of comedy. Jenko and Schmidt hated each other in high school, but suddenly, with the subtitle “Seven Years Later,” they are suddenly best friends, not to mention the coincidence of attending the same police academy. All of this happens in less than five minutes of movie time. This improbable turn of events clashes with the audience’s existing culture of cinematic certainty and creates a sense of absurdity.
The most memorable sequence in the entire movie is the drug sequence. As Jenko and Schmidt explain the mission they are about to undertake, the movie suddenly takes on a game-like format, with designed titles popping up. The movie shows the five stages of alteration when taking drugs, divided into rounds one through five, with each round labeled with a title.

This sequence feels more like watching a live game than a movie, and this twist on the format is another highlight of the movie. Because of this sequence at the beginning of the movie, the audience is disarmed by the wacky scenes that follow, such as a character’s face suddenly turning into ice cream (a form of animation), or a scene that is supposed to be dramatic but suddenly turns into a gunfight (an abrupt change in genre form). The shooting even starts with a character laughing and talking and then suddenly a bullet goes through their neck.

As you can see from the photos above, if you stop and watch the movie, you might not even be able to tell what genre it is because it’s so varied. This must have been a great adventure for the director, and it certainly makes the movie all the more sickening.

A deeper dive into goofiness

The concept of goofiness isn’t just about generating laughs, it’s an important element that sets the tone and mood of the entire movie. 21 Jump Street is very successful in this regard. The director intentionally utilizes a variety of cinematic techniques to maximize goofiness. For example, slow scene transitions and excessive slow motion exaggerate everyday situations, adding to the sense of goofiness. Also, the awkward behavior and dialogues of the main characters are another element that maximizes the silliness.

Conclusion

This is a really dumb movie. But what’s important to note is that it’s the kind of movie that it was going for. If you were to judge this movie by artistic or commercial standards, it would definitely be a C-grade movie. However, within the genre of comedy films, and more narrowly, among the films that have a maniacal laughter code of ‘sickness’, I think it can be said to be a sophisticated A-grade film that has its own concerns and attempts to take a bold adventure.
We live with too many standards these days. We tend to have too many things we have to do and too many things we have to be good at. We tend to do too much and be too good at too many things. But this movie is a movie that ignores all the other standards and holds on to one. A comedy movie is funny when it’s funny, and a sick movie is sick when it’s sick. In that sense, 21 Jump Street is the sickest movie of my life.