The new Starsky & Hutch movie faces more uphill battles than your average exercise in retro-snark. It arrives not only on the heels of several ill-fated tube salvage jobs (The Mod Squad, I Spy, S.W.A.T.) but also a full decade after Spike Jonze's "Sabotage" video, a loving supercop spoof that nailed the genre in four minutes flat. From today's rerun-fogged perspective, the series' aggro-campy, disco-sleazy vibe seems hardly distinctive—wasn't every late-'70s cop show dirty, hairy, and kind of gay? Did Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul possess any defining traits besides their tresses? (This much we remember: The blond sang "Don't Give Up on Us Baby"; the brunet went on to direct the Governator in The Running Man.) It's just as well that the filmmakers literally start from scratch: Calling itself a prequel—i.e., a pretext for nonsensical backstory—S&H is mainly a tandem vehicle for Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, the most intuitively attuned comic duo of our time.
photo: Warner Bros.
Two-mane blacktop: Stiller and Wilson
Details
Starsky & Hutch
Directed by Todd Phillips
Warner Bros.
Opens March 5
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Stiller's easily miffed Starsky, another selfless addition to the actor's gallery of emasculated heroes, is forever being compared to his late mother, a decorated veteran of the force (was Police Woman Angie Dickinson unavailable to play her in flashback?). After a botched arrest, Starsky is partnered with Wilson's nonchalantly corruptible Hutch, an internal affairs nightmare introduced, in a possible Cassavetes homage, robbing a Chinese bookie. With help from Snoop Dogg's iguana-petting informant Huggy Bear and via many enthusiastically costumed undercover operations (the funniest: mimes at a bat mitzvah), the two must stop Vince Vaughn's bloated, bronzed dealer from flooding the American market with an odorless variety of blow that tastes like sweetener: New Coke!
Director-co-writer Todd Phillips (Old School) defaults to VH1 nostalgia, mocking and celebrating 30-year-old hairstyles, pop songs, and synthetic fabrics (it must be said, the movie seriously overestimates the hilarity of dated, outsize electronic equipment). The few S&H signifiers anyone remembers are dutifully caricatured, from wah-wah pedal and screeching Gran Torino to improbable rooftop leaps and highly expressive sprinting, accentuated by slo-mo and freeze-frames. This would surely have been a more eccentric movie had Stiller or Wilson moonlighted on the script committee. (Stiller's imprint is at times evident: He does his trademark dance-off, to K.C. & the Sunshine Band, and his sideburned-mogul disguise—"Do it"—resurrects the No, No, No Guy from The Ben Stiller Show, just out on an essential two-disc DVD.)
S&H's chief pleasure is the spontaneous, sometimes quite touching rapport between the two stars, who move the duo's relationship from good-cop/bad-cop friction ("Crime called in sick," Starsky reproves a tardy Hutch. "It's getting a late start too") to the kind of mutual ease that allows two men to hang out in a precinct locker room naked but for the petite hand towels barely covering their midsections. Uncloseting the show's tight-trousered homoeroticism, Starsky & Hutch also gently subverts the gay-panic humor endemic to contemporary buddy comedies: Fans of Zoolander's stoned orgy will be delighted to hear that Will Ferrell's dragon-fetishizing convict, issuing demands and making eyes from behind a plate-glass window, forces our heroes into some mighty compromising positions.
