It’s no secret that reboots and sequels currently comprise a pretty big chunk of the biggest movie releases. Even the movies themselves have started to poke fun at this trend, with a song from Muppets Most Wanted being used in a trailer to advertise the movie with the lyrics, “We’re doing a sequel/That’s what we do in Hollywood/And everybody knows the sequel’s never quite as good.”
That song ended up being more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than an antidote to sequel syndrome, but one comedy that managed to ward off the usual reboot powers through the sheer power of self-aware humor was Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s 21 Jump Street, which ended up being far better and funnier than a Hollywood movie reboot of an 80s crime drama series really had any right to be. Perhaps the secret ingredient was writing the movie so that it was technically a sequel to the series rather than a reboot of it.
Lord and Miller’s upcoming sequel 22 Jump Street (they’ve moved across the road, you see) now faces the same challenges as Muppets Most Wanted, and it looks like it will tackle them in a similar way. “This happened because you weren’t doing the same undercover student thing you did the first time,” Deputy Chief Hardy (Nick Offerman) admonishes in the new international trailer for 22 Jump Street, after once again bringing Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) in for a scolding after a mission gone wrong. “Do the same thing. Everyone’s happy.”
Naturally, the next step after a movie about two enthusiastic but idiotic cops going undercover in a high school is to send them to college. Jenko and Schmidt are handed the exact same case as they were given in the first movie, only this time they have to track the distribution of H.F.S. all the way down to Mexico for spring break. They’re even able to reuse their old investigation board.
21 Jump Street ended up being far better than anyone really expected, and the trailers for 22 Jump Street so far have been consistently hilarious. It looks like the Tatum-Hill chemistry as as strong as ever, which makes this reboot sequel (rebootquel?) one of the most highly anticipated comedies of summer 2014.
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22 Jump Street is out in U.S. theaters on June 13, 2014.
