This movie will change your life.
With 21 Jump Street (a franchise reboot of the 1980s TV show) hitting theaters today, we looked around for what we assumed would be some terrible reviews... only to find many, many surprisingly positive ones. So if you want to avoid the St. Patrick's Day debauchery this weekend, guess you can always head over to Jump Street. Here's what reviewers had to say about the movie, which features the emotionless, dead-eyed Channing Tatum.
"It's part homage and part wink at the past. It jokes about high school but is also a sensitive sociological study of those crucial years. It bridges slapstick and action. It’s quick-witted with its pop references." — Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
"This potty-mouthed and drug-laced reimagining of the 1980s TV show has one of the highest laughs-per-minute ratios since the Naked Gun films." — Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer
Even the Grey Lady gave the film a thumbs up—but the movie can't be as entertain as A.O. Scott's review, which begins:
"Is popular culture like a river, flowing relentlessly forward so that no one ever steps in the same waters twice? Or is it like a coral reef—or, less organically, a landfill—formed out of the continuous accretion of new matter? If two wildly dissimilar objects have the same name, does it make any sense to compare them? If so, how? Please forgive the philosophical tenor of these questions: I’ve just seen 21 Jump Street, and it has left me in a ruminative mood."
He goes on to say that the movie delivers "aggressive comedy," and serves as "an example of how formula-driven entertainment can succeed." Currently the flick has an 87% freshness factor on Rotten Tomatoes, where you can read some more reviews, including one from the NY Post, whose critic calls it: "This is the funniest movie I've seen in more than a year."
