Wouldn’t it be great to revisit high school today on your own terms, with the knowledge, the self-confidence, and hindsight you gathered since? Perhaps not, as high schools in 2012 are very different creatures – you might be as painfully lost in them now as your teenage self originally was.

Wouldn’t it be fun to redo an old favourite show of yours and introduce it to new crowds? Perhaps so, but the audience today is different than the audiences of yesteryear, and that’s even without accounting for the nostalgia that itself has curious remaking powers. 

Somehow, 21 Jump Street got all of this right. I never watched the original TV show that apparently jumpstarted Johnny Depp’s career, but that did not prevent me from enjoying the new remake. Or is it a remake, even? Not only, just like the recent Muppets, self-referential and genre-aware, this movie is also unafraid to laugh at its predecessor’s faults and tropes – at the same time knowingly introducing their modern equivalents. It’s not enough to describe it as half-tribute and half-parody – it is sometimes both at the exact same time.

And it is all far funnier than I expected. Jonah Hill described the movie as “Bad Boys meets John Hughes,” which doesn’t tell the full story (I’d add a dash of Scott Pilgrim and a hyphen of Knocked up), but if this is enough to get you excited, go see it. If anything, you’ll witness possibly the most exuberant reading of Miranda rights in human history.