21 Jump Street – Blu-ray Disc Review
June 25, 2012 – 4:04 pm - Posted by: Justin SlussTags: 21 Jump Street, Blu-ray, Brie Larson, Channing Tatum, Chris Miller, Chris Parnell, Christopher Miller, Dave Franco, Dax Flame, DeRay Davis, Ellie Kemper, Ice Cube, Jonah Hill, Nick Offerman, Phil Lord, Rob Riggle, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, UltraViolet
has an average rating of 7.4 on IMDb
1080p in AVC MPEG-4 on a 50gb disc
DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio
pretty lengthy, funny & are ALL in HD
– 
– 2012
– 109 minutes
– Sony
– 
This uses 26.0GB for the movie out of 38.3GB total.
Street Date: June 26th, 2012
Overall Verdict – Hilarious Recommendation
Buy it on Blu-ray for $19.96 @ Amazon.com
— Review written by: Justin Sluss —
The Movie Itself is based on the TV series of the same title created by Stephen J. Cannell & Patrick Hasburgh that ran from 1987 through 1991. The film adaptation story was written by Michael Bacall & Jonah Hill with Bacall doing the screenplay. The film was directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller whose previous directing credit includes the CG animated film “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” from 2008.
The story here first starts out in a flashback to when our two main characters were still in high school. One of the guys “Schmidt” (played by Jonah Hill) is a total wannabe dork, complete with bleach blonde short hair, silver necklace and baggy pants trying to look like Eminem. The other main character, “Jenko” (played by Channing Tatum), is a popular jock and gets his share of the ladies. Speaking of ladies, we get to see dorky Schmidt try to ask a girl to the prom which makes him totally choke up. Jenko laughs his ass off at the poor guy as the girl just sits there confused and a tad bit in disbelief. Fast forward to the guys as young adults in their mid twenties and they’re both attending police academy. One day Jenko notices that Schmidt is there and the two start talking. Back in high school Jenko always picked on Schmidt but now the two realize they both can help each other in ways. Jenko sucks at anything to do with intelligence and Schmidt sucks at both anything to do with being physical and firing his gun. The two try to help each other and end up forming an unlikely friendship.
Our unlikely friends end up graduating from police academy together thinking that they’re destined to become badasses but we learn that to not be the case. Fast forward just a tad bit and the boys are in uniform, carrying firearms, wearing badges, sunglasses and “on the beat” so-to-speak but the problem is they’re bicycle cops. They’re in charge of policing a park. Their activities range from telling little kids to not feed the ducks to helping people get their frisbees out of the water. Until one day they get the chance to make a big arrest but they manage to screw that up. To avoid “spoilers” of sorts I won’t tell you exactly how they screw that up, but they do.
As a result of screwing up their chance at a big arrest the two officers are punished by being sent to a new patrol, “21 Jump Street” where they are to serve as undercover cops. Their new superior officer is “Captain Dickson” (played by Ice Cube) who’s a real hard ass so-to-speak. He eventually gives them their first assignment which is to pose as high school stunts because of their young looks. They’re shown that a new synthetic drug is going around the local high school that has the community worried. It’s their job to try to infiltrate the group of students believed to be selling it and most importantly find the source providing the drug and take them down. That’s the basic plot to the film. The only problem here is that one of the guys gets a bit too into the idea of reliving high school while he’s posing as an undercover police officer. The other guy manages to realize some things he missed out on the first time he went to high school and make some new interesting friends.
“21 Jump Street” as a film adaptation proved to be absolutely hilarious! I laughed so hard it hurt. There wasn’t one single moment of the film I didn’t enjoy; literally. The onscreen chemistry comedy duo of Hill and Tatum is downright amazing and could not have been cast any better. They play off of one another perfectly. Their characters are nothing alike in almost a modern “Odd Couple” sense and that’s what makes it so damn funny.
The film also proved to be very successful as it was received very well by both critics and moviegoers alike. In fact it carries a 85% (out of 100%) rating on the “tomatometer” and is “Certified Fresh” over at Rotten Tomatoes. It was a success at the box office as it ended up grossing 137.9 million dollars in domestic box office sales, 54 million dollars in foreign box office sales and reportedly cost 42 million dollars to make — according to Box Office Mojo. It made back its budget just in foreign box office sales alone. Totaled up you have 192 million dollars of worldwide box office sales the film ended up grossing. Not too bad at all! In fact, it’s known (via an IMDb listing) that a sequel is already in the works. No surprise there and personally, I for one, can’t wait.
Video Quality on this release is in full 1080p using the AVC MPEG-4 codec on a BD-50 (50 gigabyte dual-layered Blu-ray Disc) in the 2.40:1 aspect ratio. According to the technical specifications on IMDb this was shot primarily digital (in 2.8K resolution) and a few shots on Super 35MM film using the Arri Alexa and Arriflex 435 cameras. As mentioned only a few shots were done on Super 35MM film and those appear to me to be a few interior shots in the bedroom of Jonah Hill‘s character as seen HERE and HERE in screenshots. These shots obviously didn’t have the best lighting source or conditions rather as they come across very “soft” at times from excessive film grain and contain less detail. Still, those shots are for the most part short and the use of Super 35MM seems to be minimal. I’d estimate that around 98% of this was shot digitally. The blend between the two types of source material is not completely 100% seamless but it definitely works.
For both sources the black level here is perfectly solid, the color palette is vibrant at times (especially exterior daytime shots) but is a tad bit subdued at times as well to fit the visual style and the fleshtones are accurate. In the digital shots there’s a very crisp, clear visual appearance with an excellent amount of detail in most every single shot, especially in close-ups. All and all this proves to have a very impressive Hi-Def presentation well worthy of a “4.5 Star Rating” for overall video quality. Lastly, I’d like to add that the cinematography here done by DP (director of photography) Barry Peterson is done justice and proves to be impressive itself in its own right.
Audio Quality on this release is presented in DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio. The most important part in a comedy is dialogue and I’m very pleased to report that dialogue is delivered very distinctly here throughout and never once becomes “drowned out” by the music or action. As a result, no volume adjustments will need to be made. The two main things that stood out in this 5.1 lossless mix to me were the music and sound effects. The music comes both in the form of the original Score by Mark Mothersbaugh and songs on the soundtrack (or rather featured in the film). The songs here that really stood out in the mix are “Slim Shady” by Eminem, “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO and “Straight Outta Compton” by N.W.A. which actually featured co-star Ice Cube. The music here has a very powerful amount of LFE (bass) and rear channel presence. The same can be said for the sound effects throughout the film, especially the gunfire; which gets pretty damn intense. This is one rockin’ “over-the-top” lossless 5.1 mix to be primarily a comedy with some obvious action elements thrown in. It proves to be very impressive. For what this is, in terms of the film genre, this is just downright awesome in terms of sound and earns itself a “4.5 Star Rating” for overall audio quality.
Bonus Materials on this release are ALL presented in full 1080p Hi-Def (HD) video quality with Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo @192kbps sound.
- Audio Commentary with Directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and stars Jonah Hill & Channing Tatum
- Deleted Scenes (29:32 – HD) gives you a total of twenty which range from pretty damn funny to downright effin’ hilarious. Some of these are actually more extended scenes (continuations) to scenes featured in the film while others are entirely material that was cut.
- “Gag Reel” (4:58 – HD) simply put, is hilarious!
- “Cube-O-Rama” gives you more scenes featuring Ice Cube in character. At points he’s being fed lines from co-star/co-writer Jonah Hill to say. One of the lines Hill feeds Cube to say he’s not comfortable with and refuses to say. Downright hilarious shit right here.
- “Back to School” (7:43 – HD) at first starts out with some behind-the-scenes on set footage featuring an intro by Jonah Hill and then transitions into an interview with him discussing how he came up with the plot to the film with the idea of reliving high school. This also features interviews with producer Neal Moritz, co-stars Channing Tatum, Jake Johnson and Rob Riggle discussing the plot and what they’d do if they could go back and relive high school over again. There’s even more interviews after that with the directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord.
- “Brothers in Arms” (6:24 – HD) focuses on the unlikely pair-up of Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as a comedy duo in this buddy action/comedy. There’s interviews with co-stars and lots of behind-the-scenes on set footage here. This is a pretty damn funny featurette.
- “______ ____ on Set” (4:42 – HD) focuses on a cameo by a certain someone whose name I’ve blanked out to avoid dishing out “spoilers” — even though the studio didn’t have the sense to do the same. They (Sony) actually even went as far to list this on the back of the packaging. By all means DO NOT watch this featurette until you’ve seen the film. Trust me!
- “The Rob Riggle Show” (9:24 – HD) shows us how much fun co-star Rob Riggle was to have on the set. He along with Jonah Hill give interviews here and discuss that. This is some seriously funny shit!
- “Peter Pan on the Freeway” (4:12 – HD) shows us a little bit of how the big car chase scene where a certain co-star happens to be wearing a “Peter Pan” costume went down. We learn that they actually shut the freeway down to shoot this scene and passerby’s in the opposite lane were treated to a grown man wearing a Peter Pan costume. There’s also more footage here of co-stars Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill goofing off on set.
- An UltraViolet streaming & downloadable digital copy of the film is included here via a paper insert with a code and URL to redeem.
Overall the bonus materials here prove to be very worthwhile and entertaining in a humorous way. They total up to roughly 70 minutes in length and also include the audio commentary as well as an UltraViolet digital copy of the film. Pretty decent set of supplemental material here. Fans of the film will be pleased.
Blu-ray Disc packaging:
Screenshots:
NOTE: The full-sized 1920×1080 files are in a .PNG file format and uncompressed. Please be patient with the slow loading times, keep in mind these files are at least 1MB (1 megabyte) in size each.
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