THE rubric “Don’t judge a film by its trailer” led me to expect I’d detest this intellectually-deprived inflation of a 1980s TV sitcom about incompetent New York cops muddling through disasters.

It’s the second of this week’s new films classified MA for vocabulary, which “Margin Call” used rationally to emphasise emotional states, but this one uses it like verbal whitewash to elicit laughs, a cheap trick doing nothing to boost the reputations of writers Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill (also on board with co-star Channing Tatum as executive producers).

Smarter than he looks and a better actor than many of his film roles would indicate, Hill has packed the screenplay’s gaps between vocabulary malfunctions with enough wit and cinema derivations to sustain it at a level somewhere between downright stupid (doing the film more credit than it deserves) and funny (amusing us without insulting our intelligence).

Rookie cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) join an undercover team at a local high-school suspected of being a narcotics distribution centre. Interactions between students, staff, cops and crooks move more slowly that the situation merits, on the way to a school production of Peter Pan and a shoot-out at the senior prom satirising Hollywood’s tendency to burn more gunpowder than reality needs.

Hill (short, chubby) and Tatum (tall, slimmish) bear some resemblance to the Abbott and Costello comedy team of the mid-1900s. Tatum does better comedy than I expected. Johnny Depp makes an uncredited cameo appearance.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight