The writer and director Todd Phillips's big-screen adaptation of Starsky & Hutch has a crafty, can-you-dig-it? spirit, derived from his affection for the 1970s and the original TV cop series. All that's missing from the flaky fun is an announcement over the film's end credits: "Tonight, on The Love Boat ..."
The TV show featured a pair of apparently plainclothes fuzz -- who were they supposed to be fooling? -- played by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. When they weren't tumbling into each other's arms, they were sliding over the roofs of cars or over suspects' Miranda rights. Phillips may not quite be a filmmaker, but he's on his way to becoming a director. His grasp of tone is a few steps ahead of his previous film, Old School. That movie had the staticky inconsistency of the AM radio probably found in the dash of the '74 Gran Torino driven by the detectives David Starsky (Ben Stiller) and Ken Hutchinson (Owen Wilson), better known as Hutch.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BVI
The fishtailing oversteer of that eight-cylinder beast is almost another character in a plot fueled by leaded gas. It involves the detectives in hot pursuit of a drug ring, as both the car and the story career through the streets of a backdrop so anonymous that it might as well be called Santa Metro. (The actual name is Bay City.)
Starsky is probably one of those rare detectives who don't deserve the by-the-book speeches from their commanders, in this case Captain Doby (Fred Williamson, looking fit enough to keep up with his squad). Starsky is paired with another loner -- cool, shaggy Hutch -- who's a step away from being bounced from the force for dancing around sticky procedural guidelines involving payoffs and consorting with criminals.
Starsky and Hutch are tethered to a harness of buddy-movie cliches, but their congeniality comes from the actors' chemistry, demonstrated in several previous films together. As Starsky, Stiller uses the caffe Americano bravado that made his sketch turns on The Ben Stiller Show so freakishly intense. He's doing an inside-out re-creation of Glaser's puffed-chest brawler, and he has been tricked out in nearly every outfit that Starsky wore through the series's run, down to the creased jeans and blue-and-white Adidas found in contemporary photo spreads in magazines like The Fader.
Wilson is just as competitive an actor as Stiller, but sails through the movie with his toasted graciousness, which is equal parts Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the TV private eye Jim Rockford. (Like Rockford, Hutch even lives in a trailer.) Wilson has really become the stoner's version of James Garner, and his most charming asset continues to be his combination of good manners and ecstasy-flavored narcissism. While he seems to be squinting to get a fix on his conversational partner, he's actually trying to get a better look at his reflection in that person's eyes.
Avoiding the confrontational machismo that made the series a regular target in the pages of The Advocate, the movie instead plays Starsky's zealous obliviousness against Hutch's low-rent worldliness. This pays off in moments like a double-date scene that's part interrogation and part Russ Meyer, which gives Wilson a chance to recreate a David Soul moment pitched, evidently, in the key of L.
Phillips throws in cameos, both expected and wickedly surprising, that keep things hopping. Based on the number of faithfully recreated moments in the Starsky & Hutch movie, he must know that the show -- with its casual brutality and sardonic, back-alley fascism -- was derived from slap-happy action comedy-dramas like Richard Rush's 1974 Freebie and the Bean and, more specifically, Peter Hyams's 1974 Busting.
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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