21 Jump Street: Jonah Hill, the Johnny Depp of his generation?

In preparation for seeing this screen version of “21 Jump Street,” I dutifully watched a half dozen episodes of the old TV series. Its premise is that a group of undercover cops could pretend to be high-schoolers and stop teenage crime in its tracks. The show is full of eye candy (an impossibly young Johnny Depp, for instance) but it mostly grapples with serious social issues … like racism, child molestation, and vigilanteism.

In retrospect, I needn’t have bothered reviewing the television version. The film has about as much in common with the TV series as Jonah Hill does with Johnny Depp. It turns the show’s social seriousness on its head, and transforms the drama into the broadest of farces. Surprisingly, that’s not such a bad thing.

Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum play a couple of nitwit rookie cops who are so bad at their job, they’re reassigned to 21 Jump Street, a program the script freely admits is recycled from the 1980’s. In a knowing and transparent dig at the filmmakers themselves, the police chief explains that the department has to recycle stuff from the past to make up for the rampant lack of creatvity in their profession. It’s this kind of self-aware wink at the audience that saves the movie from some of its most embarrassing over-reaches.

Once Hill and Tatum enroll in high school, jokes about sex, drugs, and drinking take over much of the film. And, of course, there’s one climactic gross-out scene that gets the audience simultaneously groaning and laughing. Throw in a couple of elaborate car chases, and you have the recipe for just about every raunchy teenage American comedy of the last two decades. The funny thing is it works a lot better than you might expect.

Without getting too serious, “21 Jump Street” actually has some clever observations to make about how the scars of high school can haunt us. Imagine if you had a chance to re-do your high-school experience, how would you do things differently? Both Tatum and Hill’s characters learn a few lessons they missed on their first go-round. (The movie also has fun with how the definitions of “cool” change. All the cool kids, for instance, are now very pro- gay and eco-conscious … and Tatum gets in big trouble for miscalculating that.)

In fact, the movie is clever enough that it’s in danger of eliciting a little too much praise. An early scene in the film perfectly encapsulates this notion: Tatum keeps getting F’s on his police academy tests, so he gets Hill to help him study. When he gets the results of his next test, Tatum can hardly contain himself. He jumps up and down with absolute joy and complete abandon. Cut to the grade: C minus!

That’s sort of how I feel about “21 Jump Street.” The remake sounded so bad on paper, the fact that it isn’t terrible makes it seem a little better than it really is. Then again, that’s a lot better than the alternative.