Starsky and Hutch USA, PG-13, 101 m, 2004
Given
the alarming state of the movies these days, the last thing I’m looking for at
my local multiplex is another goddamned tribute to moldy tee-vee shows! After
suffering through The Brady Bunch Movie,
Charlie’s Angels and Mission:
Impossible (and, of course, all of their inevitable sequels), I had hoped
(nay, prayed) that the trend
would’ve run its course by now. But when greenbacks determine what kind of
fare the moguls in Hollywood will be churning out, it’s positively mad to
expect those avaricious assholes to exhibit any originality when audiences seem
more than happy to line up time and time again for their retro dreck. The
problem isn’t just that studios are more at ease with marketing a proven
commodity, it’s that audiences have lost their daring, and routinely skip over
titles that don’t contain a well-known formula. (It doesn’t help either that
the lion’s share of filmmakers these days are baby-boomers; they’re steeped
in nostalgia for a childhood that consisted of little more than pissing away
playtime by staring at the boob tube.) So (imagine a sigh here) we now have Starsky
and Hutch, which isn’t a smug goof on its inspiration a la The Brady
Bunch Movie, but it’s conversely indecisive about what it wants to be. Is
it a straightforward cops ‘n’ robbers yarn or a winking ode to the genre? A
little bit of both, I guess, but not really enough of either. Truth be told, I
haven’t a clue as to why a run-of-the-mill cop show such as “Starsky &
Hutch” merited a big-screen treatment over more worthy candidates on the order
of, say, “CHiPs” or “Run, Joe, Run.” (Only kidding.) The series didn’t
even command enough of a following to get beyond three seasons, so it’s hard
to imagine much of a built-in audience for another go at it. Yes, I watched the
show a couple of times when I was young, but those episodes have long since
dimmed from memory, so I can’t accurately speak to what virtues the show
might’ve had anyway. (I must’ve been too busy back then dreaming up my own
adventures with my Mego “Starsky & Hutch” action figures.) Based upon
this new picture’s screenplay, though, it looks like there wasn’t much of a
hook to begin with other than the tired formula of two mismatched cops being
forced to walk the same beat. That could be enough of a premise to warrant the
umpteenth reunion for Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson (Lord knows they played
beautiful music together in Stiller’s Zoolander), but director Todd
Philips appears more concerned with all those hideous 1970s appurtenances
(over-sized collars, bell-bottoms, perms) than coming up with material that
would fully capitalize on his lead actors’ comic specialties. In
tonight’s episode, Bay City cops Ken Hutchinson and David Starsky (Owen and
Stiller respectively) are on the trail of an oily drug magnate, Reese Feldman
(Vince Vaughan), who’s looking to flood the area with a new variety of cocaine
that has been modified to taste like artificial sweetener and elude the refined
sniffers of police dogs. Okay, the plot here doesn’t amount to a hill of
beans; it exists as a means of stringing together situations that’ll get the
most mileage out of Starsky and Hutch’s contradictory styles. Starsky is
by-the-book; Hutch, a loose canon. (When we first catch up with the latter,
he’s so disillusioned with police work that he’s pulling heists.)
Stiller’s a master at the slow burn, so his mounting irritation with Hutch’s
brazen indifference to proper police procedure is good for a few chuckles. But
Stiller’s big moment arrives when his character accidentally adds a packet of
“new coke” to his coffee and winds up shaking one mean tail-feather at a
local discotheque. His unorthodox style of boogieing down draws the attention of
a resident hipster (a Ron Jeremy look-alike), which results in the two throwing
down in a “dance-off” that echoes the runway competition between Stiller and
Wilson in Zoolander. (Come to think of it, this film is just one big
collection of borrowings.) Wilson gets plenty of moments to shine, too. My
favorite is when he picks up a guitar and performs “Don’t Give Up on Us,
Baby,” an homage to the original Hutch (and one-hit-wonder), David Soul. Vaughan,
on the other hand, is sadly wasted as the requisite baddie. You can certainly
fault the movie’s committee of featureless scribes for this thinly drawn
character, but Vaughan doesn’t seem interested in pulling up the slack for he
brings nothing to the party but a Fu-Manchu mustache. (Vaughan is wasting himself
with this phoned-in performance.) Juliette Lewis is also underused (and
laughably miscast) as his bikini-clad squeeze. (What’s happened to Lewis’s
career anyway? Why is she now being relegated to second-banana status in
schlocky fare such as Cold Creek Manor and Enough?)
The supporting players that do make an impression are, of course, that souped-up
Ford Gran Torino and Snoop Dog as the too-cool-for-school pimp/informant Huggy
Bear. Though he’s no Olivier, Dog has lots of fun and games with his own
superfly persona, and I daresay you’ll have fun with it, too. Just keep your
meat hooks off his flashy duds. Nobody—and I mean NOBODY—touches the Bear! During
the film’s final act, Starsky and Hutch must assume a set of disguises in
order to infiltrate a doings thrown by Feldman and seize his cache of dope.
Starsky’s alter-ego is a riff on the obnoxious “no, no, no guy” Stiller
invented for the great, but short-lived “Ben Stiller Show.” It’s always
been one of my favorite gags (I often torture my fiancée with endless
recitations of “do it”), but anybody familiar with it will wonder why
Stiller elected to plagiarize his own material for this substandard tomfoolery.
There’s no bigger fan of Ben Stiller than yours truly, but I’m beginning to
fear that there’s a hole taking shape in the bottom of his bag o’ tricks.
Starsky
& Hutch
is good-natured fluff, but too many promising bits—like the title characters
sneaking into the bat mitzvah of Feldman’s daughter dressed as
mimes—aren’t carried through to the zany climaxes we long for. (The film is
all set-ups and no pay-offs.) I also could’ve done without Starsky
accidentally firing a round into the little girl’s pony. Sure, the Farrelly
Brothers often subject their four-legged thespians (as well as their bipedal
counterparts) to all sorts of Three Stooges-style abuse, but those unfortunate
critters always live to tell the tale. (Remember that sidesplitting cut to the
pooch in the body cast in Something about Mary?) As an animal lover,
it’s easy for me to spot a kindred spirit behind the camera, and I’m betting
Philips isn’t a card-carrying member of PETA. Starsky
& Hutch
is the kind of watery filmmaking that draws largely noncommittal reviews from
the press. Most of the notices I looked over on the Internet Movie Database
share the same indifference, but there are a couple of articles worth
mentioning. Believe it or not, the pudgy thumbed Roger Ebert had a rare moment
of clarity when he noted in his evaluation of Starsky & Hutch that
the ampersand used in the film’s title was representative of a generation of
moviegoers that has become “too impatient for ‘and.’” David
Edelstein’s review, on the other hand, is a howler of PC (read: anti-WASP)
twaddle. He suggests that assigning impotent traits to Starsky instead of his
blonde-haired, blue-eyed counterpart is as much of an affront to the Jewish
people as supposedly Mel Gibson’s Passion was. Worse, when referencing
Huggy Bear, Edelstein attempts to reaffirm his bond with the brothers by
reminding us that “blacks and Jews had come through the civil rights movement
together” and, get this, “collaborated on many blaxploitation classics.”
Hey, I guess this makes Mr. Edelstein an honorary black man! (Can you say
“schmuck,” ladies and gentlemen?) Even a glass eye in a dog’s ass can see
that Mr. Edelstein is using the acronym WASP not unlike a racial slur; he
punches it many times with the same venomous spittle others reserve for
“nigger” or “kike.” Is he unaware that countless WASPs also participated
in those civil rights marches? Perhaps even David Soul. I mean, with a surname
like that, how could he not have? © Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
|