Review of CHiPs (2017) by Matt C — 30 Mar 2017

The success of 21 Jump Street was unexpected. Taking a corny '80s television property and making it a satirical meta comedy made provided for an amazing movie, and amazing sequel, and, like most successes, a series of imitations.

Now we have a similar application of formula and get CHiPs as a result. The thing with this movie is that there really is nothing to it. It's a lazy, entirely unfunnny, boring 101 minutes, nearly all of which have no character or story and hinge on the type of repetitive gay panic and misogyny that would normally be found in a low-budget early-2000s comedy or an Adam Sandler movie circa 2012.

There's no irony, structure, or edge. There are no highs or lows. CHiPs just exists in a void, a black hole where time goes on forever. Jon Baker (Dax Shepard) is a retired stunt motorcycle rider who has lost his wife (real-life spouse Kristen Bell) and tries to become a police officer in order to win back her approval.

He horribly fails all of the California Highway Patrol tests, but the sergeant (Maya Rudolph) lets him graduate for no reason other than the fact that the movie would end there otherwise. He gets paired up with Frank "Ponch" Poncherello (Michael Peña), and the two go around looking for.

.. some types of criminals? Art robbers? I don't know. The plot is incredibly underdeveloped and contrived and feels absolutely absent for almost all of the film. There doesn't seem to be a real script here, but it was ostensibly written by Shepard, who also directed, and let me say that he brings nothing to the table, just like the movie as a whole.

It's so completely unoriginal and lacking in any sort of flavor. If it's anything at times, it's tasteless, and not even in an effective or memorable way. The easy jokes that equate raunchiness with successful comedy are dependent on gay panic, dick jokes, dull sex references, and an undercurrent of misogyny.

The two main characters are so thin, and being nothing more than a dumbass and a sex addict, they don't do anything. There's no arc, no interesting dynamic, and there are no surprises. The movie bleeds genericness from the score to the editing to the cinematography to the tone to the unearned third act, and also, can movies please stop featuring "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath? It's so overused that they're starting to ruin the song.

CHiPs has no self-awareness and it doesn't seem to know its target audience. Fans of the original series won't like the content, younger audiences will see it as a Jump Street ripoff and probably be put off by the lame homophobia executed with no irony.

It's like the movie version of that old potato chip than you find crushed underneath your couch, covered in lint with an ant crawling over it, being unappealing to the point of not even wanting to really get rid of it.

It's just that this movie thinks that its viewers are stupid. 2.4/10, horrendous, D-, leagues below average, etc.