21 Jump Street (F)

I love watching the old 21 Jump Street TV Show. It is exciting, funny, and highly entertaining. I know I’m not the only one: When it was on air, that show was a hit. And for good reason. The cops were cool. They looked like regular high school kids, but they were excellent combatants, stunningly beautiful, amazingly smart, perfectly composed, and exceptionally noble. Who wouldn’t want to be like them--busting up terrible organized crime rings with a few well-placed bullets and sassy comments. Everyone admired those cops.

About thirty minutes into 21 Jump Street you realize that even though it is a parody of the original show, we are supposed to admire these cops too. They are supposed to be cool and what we want to be.

What an insult! Who exactly is this audience supposed to be? These are in no way, shape, or form admirable protagonists. They sell drugs to children, they torture people, they seduce teenagers, and they have no desire to fight for the greater good.

Now I get what the logic is: The original show had such ridiculously cool and perfect characters it was absurd for any real person to be like them. But this movie goes to the opposite extreme. It is funny for a little bit to watch people be jerks, but once you realize that the movie is a wish-fulfillment comedy about what the filmmakers expect we all would want to do as undercover cops it becomes terribly depressing.

It isn’t cool to host a giant party where someone gets stabbed. It isn’t cool to steel marijuana from police evidence and sell it to freshmen. It isn’t cool to make out with high schoolers on government paychecks.

If the newspaper printed a story about undercover cops doing any of the things they do in this movie, it would be a humongous scandal. No one would side with the cops. Yet if it is done in the disguise of a wish fulfillment comedy, it suddenly becomes okay.

These jokes are destructive. It treats serious matters like a joke, even though most people don’t actually think they are. Right now, at least. A few more years of films like these and people might think teen drug abuse, drunken brawls, sexual assault, and police brutality are really normal, everyday things.

It is particularly tragic since the original show, in addition to being a highly entertaining action thriller, served as a PSA to the dangers of drug abuse, child pornography, and other crimes that people might actually witness.

The plot of the movie centers around two policemen going undercover in a high school and getting to redo their old mistakes while also fighting brutal gangsters. Channing Tatum has finally gotten recognized as more than an Abercrombie model for this movie, which is actually tragic seeing as he has helmed some great movies (such as The Eagle) with performances ranging from a introverted soldier (Dear John) to a self-centered crack-addict (The Dilemma) without having to sacrifice his soul. His costar is Jonah Hill, a talented actor who has absolutely no taste. Here he writes and executive produces in an obvious attempt to redo the success he had with Superbad despite having the abilities to do so much more.

The directors are Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who’s biggest movie prior to this was the 90 minute fat person joke Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Michael Bacall writes, hoping a credit on this movie and Project X will stamp out the memory that he once made a legitimate comedy (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World).

If you haven’t noticed, the only person here who is known for making movies that aren’t self-referential parodies is Editor Joel Negron, who is known for action films (The Karate Kid reboot, to begin with). I guess his work is noticeable, since the action scenes are smart and fun. The comedy could be too, except every time you start to laugh they make a joke targeting the values of Jump Street-esque TV shows rather than the continuity errors. Why would honorable cops not screwing up teenager’s lives be laughable?

I sincerely hope that if a real 21 Jump Street movie came out today people would admire those cops too.

The Hunger Games (A-)

Fans could not have dreamt of a more faithful, powerful, and exciting adaptation of The Hunger Games as this movie gives.

Jennifer Lawrence plays a teenager who has long since been forced to become an adult. She has a younger sibling whom she hunts and risks her life every day to feed, and an unreliable and sometimes invalid mother who cannot be counted on. She has received little help and has long since accepted this fact. It is kind of insane how much the characters are the same. Yes, it is the exact same character as in Winter’s Bone. But that is who Katniss Everdeen is in the book, and that is a person Lawrence is best at playing. We see her coldness, we see her paranoia, and we even see enough of humanity in the character that we can relate to her.

Unlike Winter’s Bone, The Hunger Games takes place in a dystopian future where the evil Capitol government forces twenty-four teenagers to fight to the death in a miles wide arena in order to squash any ideas at a rebellion. The teens are selected randomly, with two from each district. Since Katniss’s is little more than a coal mining village she has the worst odds. It isn’t Katniss who is selected--it’s her sister, Prim--but obviously Katniss volunteers to take her place. She is paired up with Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutchinson of Journey to the Center of the Earth and its sequel), a wealthier citizen who’s life, while difficult, has not been nearly as scary as Katniss’s. This of course makes him much easier to relate to, but the movie resists the urge to make him a one-dimensional nice-guy. This movie must set up the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale Hawthorne (a rebellious villager who is Katniss’s only friend, played by The Last Song’s Liam Hemsworth), and we can’t have a stake in the romance if we don’t genuinely care about the characters.

Lawrence and Hutchinson have a great dynamic, and their relationship feels so very real. Peeta seems naive, but never stupid; Katniss is cold, yet we never hate her for it.

Gary Ross (Seabiscuit), who got the role of writer/director after creating an elaborate storyboard and some test footage and presenting it to Lionsgate, understood the basic rule of adapting a book to a movie: You must love the source material. Ross meticulously recreates every scene, and when he must make changes he clearly does so with the first and foremost thought being to be faithful to the book.

In addition to faithfully adapting the book, Ross brings such skillful directing and story-telling skills he has set himself up as a must for any action adventure Hollywood wants to have start a franchise. While there is nothing wrong with voice-over narration, it is used in an awful lot of movies, so Ross instead shows some scenes of a commentator on the games (Stanley Tucci, excellent as usual) and the conversations between the Capitol president and the guy who designed the arena (Donald Sutherland and Wes Bentley). This only works since Lawrence is such a good actress, and it is not overdone to the effect of distancing ourselves from the unknown terrors of the combat zone (a vast forest full of fearsome beasts, giant fireballs, and other terrible dangers).

Best of all, though, Ross manages to make the movie an exciting action film without having the audience delight in deaths of the other teens. This is supposed to be horrifying, and yet it is going to be difficult to make an action movie while avoiding the action. Ross uses close-ups and circles the camera around and around the chaos so as to make us feel the intensity of Katniss’s situation and worry more about her surviving than her enemies dying. For the deaths, the cast members are often so young and the kills are extremely bloody (except for viewers in England, where the film was edited), but the close-ups keep it from getting an R-rating. The editing team behind this film deserves an Oscar nomination.

There still has to be some flaws in even the best of films. Katniss’s stylist, Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), one of the book’s best characters, seems bland and boring. The alcoholic mentor of Katniss and Peeta,Haymitch Abernathy, is a fascinating person, but Woody Harrelsonsometimes hams it up a tad too much. The final monsters are a little generic and lack the realistic touches of the similar beasts in movies like The Twilight Saga and The Chronicles of Narnia. And the books famous fire-costumes look stupid and underwhelming--and out of place in the otherwise Oscar-worthy costumes. The biggest fault, though, is that there is no real conclusion to movie--it is the first in a three or four picture series and nothing is resolved.

The movie does get one point across--the frightening effects of a desensitized society’s delight in violence and barbarian values in the media in general. Reality TV is a specific target of the movie. It is still a big leap to make--after all, snuff films are still illegal--but I think it is nice to see a movie suggest that perhaps there is something unhealthy to the inherent unkindness of certain shows despite an unmistakable allure of the possibility of winning fame and fortune.

Let’s hope Lionsgate brings back Ross and his team and they manage to keep up the quality to finish the entire series.