Bay City. The ’70s. Two of the city’s worst cops meet for the first time.
David Starsky is an intense by-the-booker who worships his red-and-white
Ford Gran Torino and browbeats his co-workers, saying “crime doesn’t call in sick.” Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson is a street-smart smooth-talker who has a bad habit of robbing bookies while on undercover operations and keeping the money.
The precinct’s gruff Capt. Doby thinks these two losers deserve each other. Starsky’s had 12 partners in the past four years and Hutch will make lucky No. 13.
Will this shotgun marriage make it past the honeymoon? Starsky and Hutch don’t know it yet, but their partnership will last long enough to fill out several seasons of ’70s television police drama and will sustain enough guilty-pleasure guffaws to warrant a full-screen parody in the year 2004.
That’s right, kids. Todd Phillips, the low-comedy auteur behind last year’s “Old School,” and comedic duo Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson bring you “Starsky and Hutch,” a TV-show rehash with a twist.
In retrospect, the show was-let’s face it-a bad one, and this “Starsky and Hutch” skewers its namesake with all the kitschy mischief of an “Austin Powers” spy romp.
The fashions. The souped-up rides. The bad hair. They’re all here in spades.
Phillips and company lovingly recreate the disco era in all its tacky glory.
Cinematographer Barry Peterson’s shot compositions are spot-on for TV of the era, as is Theodore Shapiro’s gloriously unsubtle score. And the movie grooves along at a breezy pace that hearkens back to pre-MTV days when popular entertainment didn’t have to be edited like a rap video.
The plot is simple. Starsky and Hutch combine forces to track down a Bay City drug czar who’s perfected a better, sweeter brand of cocaine that can go undetected by drug-sniffing dogs. The evil mastermind behind this new coke (har har) is Reese Feldman, a corporate type who hides his crooked dealings behind philanthropic ventures such as a trust for ex-cons called “The Nearly There Foundation.”
Our heroes need help from a good informant, and no snitch on the street is more reliable or more eccentric than Huggy Bear (Snoop Dogg, that finest of American thespians). Huggy values many things-fine pimpin’ clothes, a velvet wall-hanging of Isaac Hayes, his beloved pet iguana-but none more highly than his freedom; if the cops turn a blind eye to his past forays into illegality, he’ll continue to “lay it out” for them to “play it out.”
Of course the boys have many zany misadventures on their way to a final showdown with Feldman, and Phillips keeps most of these side plots funny without letting them drag on too long. Some jokes are intelligent (Huggy’s henchman pontificate on the intricacies of terrariums, iguana biology and even Luxemburg), some are crass (a visit to a locker room finds the pair interrogating a naked cheerleader on her way to hit the showers) and some are just plain weird (Will Ferrell makes an appearance as a gay, dragon-obsessed biker named Big Earl.).
Phillips wisely plays up the homosexual undercurrent of the TV show, portraying the cops’ partnership as a goofy love story of sorts. Hutch seems up for anything, anytime in the bedroom, and Stiller’s Starsky is the definition of a rage-a-holic closet case. A telling moment: an inadvertently coked-up Starsky sees Hutch, himself trying to woo two cheerleaders into the sack with a soulful rendition of “Don’t Give Up On Us,” crooning only to him.
The goofier stuff works, for the most part, because the cast plays it seriously. Wilson has perfected his own ilk of stoner cool. He’s the perfect foil for Stiller’s tightly wound Starsky.
Stiller takes his character over-the-top, but it’s a gamble that pays off. Whether ripping apart an interrogation room in over-baked “bad-cop” hysteria or challenging a high-haired disco king to an impromptu dance-off, Stiller has never been funnier.
The supporting cast is equally good at milking laughs from sometimes-thin material. Blaxploitation icon Fred Williamson’s Captain Doby is a terse and hilarious walking clich. Vince Vaughn is a smarmy delight as the evil Feldman. And Snoop Dogg is a hoot (intentional or not, what’s it matter?) as Huggy Bear, inspiring guffaws with his flamboyant wardrobe and insightful street sense (“I know some people who know some people who robbed some people”).
For all its well-played tomfoolery, “Starsky and Hutch” smacks a bit too much of “been there, done that.” Kitsch is a trend on the downswing; it’s just not as fresh as it was five years ago. This film feels like it would have played better in the nostalgia boon of the mid-’90s, somewhere snugly between “The Brady Bunch Movie” and “The Spy Who Shagged Me.” It feels stale today.
There are some hearty laughs and a lot of smiles, but they’re evened out by groans. By the time Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul (the original Starsky and Hutch) show up for a nonsensical last-minute cameo as … well, as themselves … the film has proven as clunky and erratic as a ride in Starsky’s ever-speeding Torino.
Still, “Starsky and Hutch” cruises close to the finish line on the sweet-natured chemistry of its leading men. Many jokes work in the moment, but they’re forgotten by the time you hit the lobby on your way out. If the film fails, it does so by not quite living up to the loopy high offered by its source material.
It’s funny, sure, but not enough to make this comedy anything more than an affable diversion.