I was not sure whether I would go to see 21 Jump Street or Not. I was hearing a lot about it, but I was not swayed. I was swayed a little bit more towards seeing it after MGM claimed that it is going to be the revenue earner after the movie ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ flopped at the box office. In the end, I got swayed – when one of the actress from the movie appeared on the Ellen show and the scene that was played out for the audience showed a humorous scene that was at my acceptable level of raunchy-ness.
However, the combination of the pervasive use of language at a place I consider holy, ridiculing nerds as one who would easily fall prey to sexy girls, making an institution where you seek learning as the centerpiece of drug activity, ridiculing the law enforcement as the good for nothing agency, and making the private parts of the human body as the centerpiece for the entire movie script, and, combing them all in one movie was too much for me to take in.
This movie got me thinking in several directions. While accepting the humor whether it is subtle or raw (as this movie embraces), accepting the satire, accepting the irony of the situation, and the sarcasm as part of making a funny movie, what made me sad was that the audience was an average age of 18-plus not barring a eight-year-old boy who was with his father. If our younger generation can only understand and are able to enjoy such raw humor, I beg to ask this question: Are we getting closer and closer to accepting the low-level existence of our animal behavior and moving further and farther away from acquiring such subtle behaviors making us different as human beings?
I am not sure whether such a movie would have been accepted if made, say, just after a movie like Gods Must be Crazy. I think we tend to accept an increased level of crude humor when it is introduced in low doses and when we accumulate it over a long period of time to finally make it one of the main ingredients of such a movie that I, recently, was trying to avoid.
I think what made this movie dumb was the fact that satire was out-of-place or too much on the plate, the pervasive use of language was peppered or crudely presented, all of the institutions that I respect were ridiculed in the movie and all at once, the entire movie script lacking punch lines except to deliver them around the private parts of the human body and of course seeing the audience of 18-plus enjoying it.
I do understand that these observations could be classified as old school or out of touch with current world reality. But my push here is to continue using satire, sarcasm and all other parts of the spoken language to bring us home the comedy that is good enough be served on a plate to relish than to getting it thrown on the ground.
I would rather have accepted the title of “21 Dumb Street” for the movie rather than “21 Jump Street”. We have seen earlier movies coming out with titles like ‘Dumb and Dumber’ relaying to the movie goers on the nature of the movie to help them choose or not to choose to see the movie. But now should we accept this as a new way to market such un-palatable ingredients to general public?