Channing Tatum Is Funny. Really. 21 Jump Street, Reviewed. [Grierson & Leitch]

1. It’s surprising that it took this long for someone to mix the peanut butter of Apatowian bromance comedies with the chocolate of the buddy cop film. They’re natural allies, with their undercurrents of false machismo, crippling fear of women and unmistakable male panic. It’s tough not to lament the buddy cop formula, really; it had a built-in structure the same as a musical or a horror film, and the pleasure was in the variations on the cliche rather than its repetitions. (Done right: Lethal Weapon. Done wrong: Collision Course.) But the buddy cop genre had turned so hoary that you couldn’t even do one anymore without parodying the whole idea, done well in The Other Guys and done even better, alas, in 21 Jump Street, a brand-name retread that, as it turns out, is far, far more fun than it has any right to be. It falls apart over the last half hour, but for the first hour, this is a frenetic, legitimately inspired comedy. Really. More »