For Discussion: 22 Jump Street and the Blessing or Curse of Expectations

Every time I told someone I saw 22 Jump Street last weekend, I felt judged. When I would instantly praise the virtues of 2012's 21 Jump Street as evidence that its sequel was something worth getting excited about, I was still met with skepticism. Then I remembered something, my experience, and judging by the internet, most critics' experience of 21 Jump Street benefited from low expectations. Movies, especially comedies, succeed or fail based on audience expectations. Even Rotten Tomatoes in its aggregate summary noted that the movie "offers rowdy mainstream comedy with a surprisingly satisfying bite." "Surprising" is the key word here.

Why are we surprised? Simply, it's because we see a trailer and instantly judge what kind of experience we assume we'd have watching said advertised movie. How that movie meets or fails those expectations directly affects our enjoyment. 21 Jump Street is an objectively well-made movie. The writing is clever, the actors are committed and the direction is confident. However, going in the audience was conditioned to expect the worst based on the fact that the movie is a reboot of an old TV show. We'd lived through Dukes of Hazzard and Charlie's Angels, after all. Even someone who'd never seen the TV show could still learn from past experience that these movies are usually terrible. But I somehow found myself giving it a chance and I'm so glad I did. Now the sequel is here and it again surpassed my expectations. We've been conditioned to expect sequels to be inferior movies. This one embraces that expectation and then has so much fun proving it wrong.

The tricky part comes now. I've talked these movies up so much that people who have watched them based on my glowing recommendation inevitably find themselves underwhelmed. What can we do?! How can we watch a movie without any expectations in order to have a more pure movie-going experience? I'm open to suggestions.

What about you guys? What's a movie that has defied your expectations lately, either for the good or bad? My other recent case of defied expectations was Godzilla. That movie's trailer sold me a lie (Cranston's importance) and I couldn't recover from it for the rest of the movie.