It’s always encouraging to see a smart film doing well – even reaching the top of the box-office charts. Yes, 22 Jump Street is a Hollywood blockbuster with A-list stars, and it’s a sequel to boot; it was never going straight to bargain bins on garage forecourts. Where it exceeds expectations is in marrying the knowingness of its writing to the gleeful, unimpeachable sincerity of its performances. Channing Tatum in particular has developed into a joyous comic actor, coasting on perfumed clouds of oblivious delirium. It isn’t that he plays his character, the undercover cop Jenko, as dumb exactly – though his malapropisms (especially a spectacular one involving the name “Cate Blanchett”, which David Denby in the New Yorker was kind enough to spoil for his readers) are sublime. He reminded me more of Alicia Silverstone as Cher in Clueless, characterised by a lack of self-awareness that insulates him from social ravages. Ignorance is comic bliss. (This contrasts nicely with the combative intelligence of the newcomer Jillian Bell, who gives a film-stealing, star-making performance: an apparent cameo that blossoms into something bigger.)
But I was surprised to read on Indiewire an article lambasting the movie for its “meta-homophobia”. This film isn’t just homofriendly – it’s homolovely. It seems to me that you have to try very hard, and look so far between the lines that you cannot see those lines any more, in order to discern anything homophobic or even mildly hateful in 22 Jump Street. This is a film that relishes all its characters, and gives a rich gloss to even its cheapest jokes. The nearest that the movie sails to the uncharitable is in a scene involving the villain from the previous Jump Street movie; his penis was shot off in a gunfight to be replaced with a makeshift vagina. There are some throwaway gags about how his cellmate, a fellow antagonist from the original film, is coerced into servicing him sexually, but it would take an inordinate amount of effort and distortion to see this as a transphobic jibe. Being transgender is about more than having had one set of genitals replaced with another; it isn’t a dressing-up game in which we can all put on or remove prosthetic body parts. It comes from within: it is about who a person is inside. Any external equipment has to be adjusted to be consistent with the internal, but it isn’t genitalia that makes a person transgender.
- The cops talk about their relationship.
- Psychologist gets the wrong end of the stick.
- Cops cotton on eventually to his misinterpretation, long after the audience has, and proceed to profess disgust and repulsion, perhaps attempting a variation on the ostentatiously macho banter with which Steve Martin and John Candy struggle to cleanse themselves of their accidental intimacy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
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