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'Starsky & Hutch' is a comedy misdemeanorRemake of '70s cop show is nowhere near best work of Stiller or Wilson
Of course, Ben Stiller wants to keep working with Owen Wilson. He’s the only actor whose routine is more tired than Stiller’s. Even though his character was an honest cop in the TV series “Starsky & Hutch,” Wilson trots out the same laid-back, amoral stoner act he uses in every movie. The surprise is that Stiller, whose neurotic, accident-prone act has gotten quite a workout, too, actually plays a new character in “Starsky & Hutch”: a by-the-book cop who doesn’t know how to have fun. “ Starsky & Hutch” might seem funnier if the “Naked Gun” movies hadn’t already parodied cop show cliches or if the writers had bothered to go beyond the hey-wouldn’t-it-be-funny-if conversation and invented some things that actually are funny (the best scene, a dance-off featuring Stiller and Har Mar Superstar, is lifted from the runway competition in “Zoolander”). The whole project has the feel of something dreamed up during an attack of the munchies, when everything seems more amusing than it is. The reliably droll Vince Vaughn is wasted as a drug kingpin, as is Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear, the cops’ wily informant. His dialogue isn’t funny, and Snoop’s low-energy performance is decidedly on da hook. Even when the movie does rouse itself out of its torpor to tell a joke, it assumes an encyclopedic knowledge of the superhits of the ‘70s: What percentage of the moviegoing public will appreciate a comic aside about Jim Croce? Or about “Don’t Give Up on Us, Baby”? Unfortunately, once you get past the overdone action-movie bits (bullets spray everywhere since nobody in the movie can hit the broad side of a continent) and the hideous ‘70s fashions, there’s not much left. Even the look of “Starsky” doesn’t feel genuine (where, for instance, are the pukka-shell necklaces?). Like everything else in the film, it is secondhand, not connoting the ‘70s but a low-quality, Urban Outfitters copy of them. |
