Sony has released a red band trailer for its upcoming action-comedy 21 Jump Street. Based on the 1980s series that launched Johnny Depp’s career, the film stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as two cops who are assigned to a special squad that goes undercover in high schoolsto root out drug dealers. Where the original series was played as a straight cop drama, this big screen version is being played strictly for laughs. (Because that worked so well for The Green Hornet.) The movie is directed by Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs‘s Phil Lord and Chris Miller making their live action debut here.
While I wasn’t much of a fan of the original series when it aired in the 80s – I thought the premise a mite implausible given that most teenagers usually knew a couple of students at other schools and word would get around pretty fast if there were undercover cops showing up on various school systems – I think that this is an absolute terrible direction to go with the material.
And this makes the third day in a row we’ve had a story about an old television series heading to the big screen following Monday‘s news about a Fall Guy movie and yesterday‘s story that Bill Paxton will be directing a revival of Kung Fu. Will tomorrow bring a fourth story of an old television series being turned into a movie? We’ll see.
