Film Review: 21 Jump Street

Certificate: 15 (crude and sexual content, pervasive language, drug material, teen drinking and some violence)
Directed By: Phil Lord & Chris Miller
Cast: Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Brie Larson, Dave Franco, Rob Riggle, DeRay Davis, Ice Cube, Dax Flame, Chris Parnell, Ellie Kemper
Budget: $42 million
Runtime: 109 minutes
Trailer: Watch

You would think that the odd-couple cop movie doesn't have much left to offer the genre in terms of originality, but never underestimate what a touch of Jonah Hill can bring to a film. To be sure, 21 Jump Street is a delightful little package which is part police academy, part high-school comedy which makes some amusing observations particularly poignant to those of us now in our mid-twenties.

As teens Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) were each other's antithesis, the former your quintessential nerd and the latter your stereotypical jock. Now adults, best friends and partners in the police force, these two bumbling cops are sent back to high-school on an undercover mission to bust a drug ring. However, the dynamic duo are quick to note how different the place is since they were last there.

Yes, 21 Jump Street is your typical fish-out-of-water scenario, but what's more amusing is how it picks up on the shifts in cultural trends over the last ten years. These two young cops are barely out their teens, but in less than ten years they soon find out how what was once cool is no longer. It's a scenario any young thing might expect from their parents; asking whether Nickelback are cool, mistakingly naming every games console a Playstation and boasting to their friends what you got in your "O-Levels", but it is something you're less likely to expect from someone in their twenties. However, the sad truth is that I, as a young man in his mid-twenties, am increasingly being forced to admit that I don't have a clue anymore as to what's cool and what's not. I swore I would never let it happen, but the plight presented here by Schmidt and Jenko is one I can wholly sympathise with.

To illustrate, movies of the late nineties and early two-thousands such as American Pie or Mean Girls portrayed high-schools to be incredibly cliquey, catty places where sporty jocks and bitchy cheerleaders ruled the roost. Returning, Schmidt and Jenko find this is no longer the case; the popular kids are tech-savvy eco-warriors, politically correct to a falt. Jenko, the popular jock during his day is bewildered while Schmidt ironically finds himself in his element. What's great about how 21 Jump Street portrays this though is that it never forcefully hammers this point home, instead teasing those of us now in our twenties that we're well on our way to being the uncool archetypes of our parents we swore we'd never be.

Performances are good all round, but the dialogue is particularly sharp, featuring a plethora of sharp put-downs most enjoyably delivered by one Ice Cube. Moreover 21 Jump Street  ranges from slapstick to deliberate absurdity as the jokes never stop. The consistent stream of wisecracks, which are fortunately very funny as well, make this an easily accessible and breezy comedy. Perhaps what doesn't work so well however is the amalgamation of high-school and cop comedy in what seems to be two slightly disjointed story lines. While the two attempt to fuse, it's not particularly convincing as if to say it all feels slightly adlib. This is especially prevalent in the third act where everything seems to lose focus a little bit.

Despite being quite a chaotic affair, 21 Jump Street remains a light hearted and enjoyable entertainment. It works far better as a high-school comedy than a cop one, and it's a tad of a shame that its plot is a bit all over the place, but the laughs keep coming that you will scarcely mind.

Film Review: The Eagle

Romans. The Americans of their day, sporting a vast Empire across the known world. It perhaps only fitting then to give all the Romans in The Eagle an American accent. It's hardly subtle in its deliberate allegory, similar to that when Hollywood casts Brits in roles of villains as some sort of parallel with the American Revolution, but it is annoying in the sense that it detracts from the 'period feel' of ancient Rome. Certainly, I found it difficult to get that distracting little voice out of my head which was screaming throughout the film "Yanks!". But then I suppose we couldn't have Americans playing the oppressed peoples of the British Isles under Rome's yoke. That would have been too ridiculous...

When Marcus Flavius Aquila (Tatum), a young centurion bent on restoring his family's honour after his father lead an ill-fated expedition of the Ninth Legion, is permanently incapacitated within a day of his first command, he finds himself milling away his days around his Uncle's (Sutherland) villa after an honourable discharge. After saving a British slave named Esca (Bell) from death in a gladiatorial arena, the two form a bond and embark on a mission to retrieve his father's Ninth Legion standard, a golden eagle rumoured to be in the possession of a vicious tribe north of Hadrian's Wall.

The Eagle is based on a 1954 novel by by Rosemary Sutcliff called The Eagle of the Ninth. Part fact, part fiction, it is based around the myth surrounding the Legio IX Hispana, a Roman legion which was rumoured to have been destroyed by Caledonian tribes in AD 117. Since its publication however new historical evidence has come to light that the Ninth Legion was not in fact destroyed in Scotland, with records showing that elements of the Ninth were actually posted along the Rhine after AD 117. Further, the actual golden eagle upon which the story is based, housed in a museum in Reading, is not that of a Legion's standard but that of a Jupiter statue in the forum of the Roman town. As such, as a 'historical epic', The Eagle suffers from the advances made in historical study, making the film less fact and more fiction.

The Eagle starts off with a bang as the fresh faced Aquila faces an assault on his new command in the opening minutes. We are introduced to Roman fighting tactics such as the 'tortoise' in brutal fashion, with the shaky, gritty, close-up action shots we've come to expect from films set in the ancient world. It sets a good tone for an exhilarating film and the action scenes do indeed remain consistent throughout. But the problem is the bits in between which feel disjointed from the action scenes. Essentially, The Eagle amounts to a mismatched buddy movie. It follows the formula where two people who couldn't be any different from one another are thrown together for whatever reason, and, over a series of events, are able to bond and surmount those differences where by the end the two will have developed a bemusing friendship. Sure, this is the end result of The Eagle, but it is the 'how' which is missing as the film sort of stumbles along. We are treated to bits where the two bond, but the developing friendship is never actually transmitted. As such Esca's actions appear particularly odd and the whole relationship becomes a sympathetic fallacy. Director Kevin Macdonald does interestingly try to create a juxtaposition of scenery with Roman occupied Southern Britain bathed in sunlight, covered in vine leaves with the harsh, barren, windswept highlands of the North in an attempt to show the contrast between civilization and barbary. However, you can't help but smirk if you've ever experienced the tenuous British summer.

Historically inaccurate, made all the more jarring by American accents, and bogged down by a plot based around a peculiarly dysfunctional, robotic relationship, this film is substantially less epic than the trailers would have you believe. Unfortunately, The Eagle never really finds flight.