There is no question I like my movies silly. Silly but smart and self-aware.

Similarly, I like my Channing Tatum silly. Silly but smart and self-aware.

22 Jump Street delivers on both expectations in spades.

When a beautiful person – like Tatum or, say, Jon Hamm or Charlize Theron – can let their freak flag fly, shed vanity, and just be a big goof, I find that endlessly appealing. Tatum, with his James-Dean-on-steroids pout and lunkhead-with-sparkle charm, hit an unexpected comedic home run with the cinematic adaptation of 21 Jump Street in 2012. And that left-field success is (quite literally) repeated with 2014’s sequel.

Tatum’s partner in (fighting) crime Jonah Hill is the perfect match in his sheer opposite-ness. When we first met their characters “Jenko” (Tatum) and “Schmidt” (Hill) in 21 Jump Street, comic gold was spun from their playing against type. Tatum was the loose-limbed Looney Tune, and Hill was his (sort of) straight man. (Imagine Bud Abbott in Lou Costello’s body.)

Wisely, the formula carries over in the now-franchise’s latest installment. Rather than posing as high school students to break up a drug ring, however, cops Jenko and Schmidt go to (wait for it) college to break up a drug ring. The very meta film, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (on a satirical roll following February’s blockbuster The Lego Movie), gives us one, yes, self-aware joke after another, ridiculing Hollywood’s tendency to bloat and distort what was once witty originality in the crass desire to mint money from one unnecessary sequel after another.

You know you’re in good hands when the redoubtable Rob Riggle reappears from the first film, continuing to crack wise on how the “boys” look like 40-year-olds and shamelessly ridiculing Schmidt’s whiny sycophancy.

Other standouts in the cast include Jillian Bell as sardonic (and just plain hysterically mean) college dorm devil “Mercedes;” Wyatt Russell (son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell) as a golden-haired, puka-shell-necklace-wearing frat/football bro “Zook;” and Ice Cube (as cantankerous “Captain Dickson”) who has somehow managed to turn his rage-against-any-machine 90s persona into wry, whip-smart comic firepower.

The plot is admittedly inconsequential. The film starts nowhere and ends in the same place – pretty much all by design. However, if you want to see two good-hearted, happy-as-clams performers (Tatum and Hill) decimate a college campus while careening about in a go-cart decorated like a football helmet or skewer all the tried-and-true spring break Where the Boys Are cliches or offer zany subtle-as-a-sledgehammer critique of America’s ongoing puritanical dance with homophobia, then this is the movie for you. And for me.

(And be sure to stay through the credits. Some of the free-wheeling-est jokes are made as the filmmakers propose about 30 more Jump Street films that could keep the team of Tatum and Hill in business for decades.)

P.S. Thanks to my mom – author and columnist – Susie Duncan Sexton for allowing me to guest-write her ‘Old Type Writer’ column this month on Jennifer Zartman Romano’s ‘Talk of the Town.’ You can check out our tribute to Tony Award-winning actress Laura Benanti here.

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Reel Roy Reviews is now a book! Thanks to BroadwayWorld for this coverage – click here to view. In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the book currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.