Deputy Chief Hardy, played by the wonderfully moustached Nick Offerman, may as well be renamed Captain Meta. Everything he says is a play on the fact it's a film, or is a dig at the film industry for coming up with nothing original and relying on reboots and sequels. Talking to the two boys at the beginning of the movie, he explains that "nobody gave a sh*t about the Jump Street reboot, but you got lucky. So this department has invested a lot of money to make sure Jump Street keeps going, even though it's never as good the second time around." He then goes onto explain that, with a bigger budget, they need to do the exact same thing as the first time because it somehow worked, before outlining what personal turmoil they will both go through with each other to the letter. Hardy is a character dedicated to having a dig at franchises and Hollywood's formulaic approach and tendency for unoriginality, and it pays off wonderfully here. It's worth saying that they try to do, as Hardy and Dickson both say, the "exact same" thing as last time ("infiltrate the dealer, find the supplier"), but it fails and they arrest the wrong person - is this, perhaps, the screenwriter and Lord and Miller's way of saying that sequels should do something new rather than stick to the same old approach?
