Few trends in moviemaking are as craven as the strip-mining of old TV shows to make today’s wannabe big-screen hits. Ill-fated adaptations of TV Land favorites litter the video store shelves: Remember The Mod Squad? Sgt. Bilko? Car 54, Where Are You?
But director Todd Phillips’ take on the kitschy 1975-79 ABC cop show “Starsky ‘ Hutch” strikes the perfect balance between nostalgia and ridicule, much like 1995’s priceless The Brady Bunch Movie. Cannily aware that most of its target audience is probably unfamiliar with the David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser buddy-cop campfest, the film uses the source material as a springboard for an extremely effective pairing of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in the leading roles.
Stiller, stepping in for Glaser as the straitlaced David Starsky (dig the perm and check out those creases in his jeans), is the straight man to Wilson’s Ken Hutchinson (Wilson sports a modified version of Soul’s blonde helmet ‘do).
The film takes a semi-prequel approach, showing how Hutch and Starsky become partners. Both unpopular among the Bay City Police Department (Hutch is a loose cannon, and Starsky is a killjoy), they team up to investigate a corpse that’s washed up in the Bay City harbor.
Starsky tools around in his red Ford Torino, Hutch steals evidence and tries to sleep with witnesses (including Carmen Electra and Amy Smart as perky cheerleaders).
Because no version of “Starsky ‘ Hutch” would be complete without Huggy Bear, the jive-talkin’ pimp informant, the film gives us Snoop Dogg, waltzing through his scenes with the lan of a downtown drag queen.
The film’s casting is inspired in almost every role – Phillips directed Old School, and most of that movie’s company is back. Vince Vaughn tosses off devastating motor-mouthed one-liners as Reese Feldman, a coke kingpin who just wants a nice bat mitzvah for his daughter. (“Take a ‘lude or something. Calm down,” he tells his frantic right-hand man, played by Jason Bateman.)
Phillips once again makes brief, brilliant use of Juliette Lewis as Feldman’s “girl on the side.” And with blaxploitation star Fred Williamson as the police captain, the movie’s credit is assured.
But this is Stiller and Wilson’s show, and the actors prove once again that they have more chemistry with each other than either has ever had with a female co-star. The film plays up the homoerotic elements of the TV series, especially when Will Ferrell shows up unbilled as a witness who makes the partners go to extremes to get him talking.
The beauty of Starsky ‘ Hutch is the way it uses the series as a template for its stars’ greatest strengths – Stiller’s false cockiness, Wilson’s laidback swagger – in a rambunctiously funny parody of ’70s kitsch.
A disco sequence has some of the same thrill of Boogie Nights, when Starsky, having accidentally dosed himself with 30 grams of cocaine, enters into a violently funny dance-off that’s almost as funny as the “walk-off” scene in Zoolander. Only this one ends in gunplay.
