It is full of the usual boy-comedy stuff: homophobic humor so blatant that it must be making fun of homophobia (right?) easy, knowing sendups of movie and television clichés appearances by actors from your favorite sitcoms (assuming you like “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “New Girl”) exploding cars a joke about “Glee.” And though no conceptual ground is broken that wasn’t already trampled and scorched in the Harold and Kumar movies (to cite only the three most sophisticated examples), the whole mess is silly, spirited and, yes, smart enough to work. Largely forsaking the sweet multiculturalism of the original for white-dude bromance, and completely abandoning earnest teenagers-in-crisis melodrama in favor of crude, aggressive comedy, this “21 Jump Street” is an example of how formula-driven entertainment can succeed. It wants to be fun and, to a perhaps surprising extent, it is. Not that the movie, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and based on the semi-beloved, dimly recalled Fox cop show that made Johnny Depp a star in the late 1980s, aims to be thought-provoking. Is popular culture like a river, flowing relentlessly forward so that no one ever steps in the same waters twice? Or is it like a coral reef - or, less organically, a landfill - formed out of the continuous accretion of new matter? If two wildly dissimilar objects have the same name, does it make any sense to compare them? If so, how? Please forgive the philosophical tenor of these questions: I’ve just seen “21 Jump Street,” and it has left me in a ruminative mood.
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