Film Carew: 22 Jump Street, Frank

22 JUMP STREET

The 2012 21 Jump Street was a pleasant case of a film over-reaching its limitations; writers Jonah Hill and Michael Bacall taking an audience's exasperated reaction to its existence - yet another '80s property retrofitted as brainless blockbuster fodder - and making that the resulting film's central comic premise. It was an undercover action-movie through the Mystery Science looking-glass: offering, as it went, a running commentary on a culture of remakes, homoerotic buddy-cop comedies, and 30-year-olds playing teenagers. It remade a shitty TV show as a shitty movie, invited audiences to be in on the joke, then amped up the lunacy.

With 21 Jump Street's success leading to the obligatory sequel, an audience is likely to be suspicious that the last film's flippant charm can hold up a second time around. So, Hill and Bacall – once more penning the premise, and working with Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller - take that audience prejudice and, again, hand it back with a wink; 22 Jump Street's raison d'être to examine Hollywood's obsession with sequels.

“It's always worse the second time around,” pronounces Nick Offerman's eye-rolling captain, once again wheeled out to speak the movie's meta-text aloud. “Nobody gave a shit about this Jump Street reboot” first time 'round, but with the 'success' of the first program, they've doubled the budget, and moved across the street to a bigger HQ (where Ice Cube's new high-tech office looks “like a giant ice cube”). “Do the same thing as last time, and everyone is happy,” Offerman says, mocking not just the movie itself, but all those sitting in the cinema.

Words to this effect are turned into 22 Jump Street's repeated motif: it's just like last time, exactly like last time; it's the same case, do the same thing. Hill and Channing Tatum, the franchise's Original Odd Couple, are turning the same comic trick: the former a ball of neuroses running headlong into humiliations; the latter the physical specimen failing at being a functional adult. But if their high-school experience was about dealing with changing cultural cachet and the limits of cliché, college is, as a cameo-ing Patton Oswalt intones (in shades of the Inspirational Teacher), a place for self-discovery. This leads to the film's other great running gag: that these two 'partners' playing brothers are in a relationship; Tatum the top to Hill's bottom; a whole run of jokes - from Tatum's meet-cute-sparked 'affair' with a footballin' bro, to a couples-therapy psych session, to the pair “investigating other people” then getting back together as a “one-time only thing” - blowing out the homoerotic subtext of 'buddy-cop' coupling.

College is also a place for its own clichés: they're at the mythical U of Metro City State, whose football team is called the Statesmen. Their rivals in boiler-plate placelessness are from College General. On spring break, they go to the apparitional cultural other of Puerto Mexico. There's beer pong and frat rushes, football games and dorm-room sleepovers, one-night-stands and the walk-of-shame in their wake. There's Wyatt Russell as Tatum's bro-crush, and Amber Stevens as Hill's love-interest, and even that casting feels like a wink to the audience: Hollywood children being their own kind of trans-generational sequels. Jillian Bell fares far better as Stevens' bitchy roommate, her non-stop barrage of Hill-as-senior-citizen gags and heel-turn marking her role as the film's breakout one. Elsewhere, there's cameos from everyone from Queen Latifah to Seth Rogen, Richard Grieco to Diplo. And, of course, the winking return of half the original's cast.

“Maybe we're only supposed to do this once,” Hill laments, in the film's end-of-the-second-act 'down' moment, but 22 Jump Street's second go-around doesn't let you sound the same lament. Its awareness of its own loathsomeness is too infectious, too electric; the running commentary on the bigger budget and the cost of staging car-chases signalling an ascension to a new meta-movie level, in which the comedy mocks not only the tropes of the source-text, but the whole way Hollywood does business.

That sentiment crests when the final credits spiral outwards into a neverending sketch-comedy tour of satirical sequels, spin-offs, and crass commercial cash-ins; in which Hill and Tatum are indentured to the same roles unto contractually-obligated eternity. This biting-the-hand-that-feeds gag feels like a preemptive strike on the franchise itself; as if its own makers are horrified by the prospect of future installments. But with the global box-office already turning Jump Street from commodity into cash-cow, you get the sense that someone, somewhere, is already working on turning 23 Jump Street from a throwaway joke into a two-hour one.

FRANK

Frank Sidebottom was the comic creation of Chris Sievey, a semi-musical character whose stand-up show and minor-English-television celebrity were most notable for the fact that he wore a giant fiberglass head; its grinning visage a symbol of the characters' cheerful optimism, unflagging in the face of constant failure. Lenny Abrahamson's Frank was originally going to be an adaptation of Jon Ronson's true tales of playing in Sievey's band, but it was abandoned for a fictionalised tale. Now, Domhnall Gleeson plays the role of cheerfully-optimistic smalltown Pollyanna (14 Twitter and 18 Tumblr followers = the cheapest of millennial comedy) as audience 'in', with Michael Fassbender, the man in the big head, no longer an ironic comic creation, but a crazed cult-leader who remains forever in characters. Ronson cites Daniel Johnston and Captain Beefheart as informing Fassbender's character; he part outsider-art loon, part fanatical drill-sergeant. But Abrahamson - last seen directing teen melodrama What Richard Did - seems at a loss to do with the premise; blowing a wild idea, a loaded cast, and a possibly-fascinating psychological study in the process.

Frank is being praised for its “weirdness”, but aside from a gloriously spiteful turn by Maggie Gyllenhaal, it's staggeringly conservative. The music made, herein, doesn't sound anything like Daniel Johnston or Captain Beefheart; nor, for that matter, Wesley Willis or The Shaggs. When the cast - Fassbender, Gleeson, Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy, Carla Azar (drummer for Autolux and Jack White), and François Civil (previously seen in band on screen in the nostalgic bro-out Bus Palladium) - are left free to jam live, they sound pleasingly psychedelic, but Abrahamson sees even the vaguest signifiers of experimental and/or outsider music as something to snigger at. Pitch-shifting a synthesiser, playing a theremin, making a field-recording, using art as therapy, having a mental illness: all are played for laughs; these non-jokes falling flat, dead. And when Frank lands at SXSW, in a dire flurry of on-screen tweets, it reaches a nadir that suggests its scared of its own idea: that bands can be refuges for fucked-up people, making music not to 'make it', but to survive.