Hyams's picture was so much the blueprint for the producer Aaron Spelling's TV construction that several Busting sequences made it into the Starsky & Hutch pilot. The varsity jacket that Elliott Gould's vice cop wore in Busting became part of Hutch's wardrobe. (Wilson also sports one in the film when he's not parading in a collection of vintage leather jackets that will break the hearts of thrift-store buccaneers.)
Phillips and his team upholster the film, which opens today nationwide, with a luscious 70s vibe. The sets luxuriate in the production designer Edward Verreaux's period credibility; Theodore Shapiro mines musical gold more thoughtful than mere pastiche. And the costume designer Louise Mingenbach earns the attention lavished on her handiwork: one of the villains wears a retro robin's-egg-blue suit that's simply too cool for words. As boldly captured by the cinematographer Barry Peterson, the atmosphere is what the Cure's Robert Smith might describe as "lime green, a sickly kind of orange."
Certainly, the crime lord Reese Feldman (Vince Vaughn, wearing a sprawling mustache suggesting a chocolate-milk smear on John Holmes's face) has the best-laid plans this side of America. He's invented a type of cocaine that can't be detected by normal means. Though he seems to have absorbed Bill Murray's offhanded brutishness whole, Vaughn's brash brattiness should be enshrined: an Ugly American statue on display at the Burbank Museum of Modern Art.
But the movie's advertising tagline (Starsky & Hutch -- they're the Man) needs to be amended. The film belongs, completely and utterly, to Snoop Dogg.
Picking up the mantle of the police informant Huggy Bear, Snoop Dogg wears audience rapport as if it were a new fragrance. He plays the movie like a B side, and the stars have smarts enough to get out of his way. He's the man; everyone else is just standing in his shadow.
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