'Starsky & Hutch' should have been left in the '70s

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The Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson comedy may have the look down, but it's missing laughs.

By Omar Gallaga
American-Statesman Staff

Posted: March 5, 2004

Will Ferrell, the tall and frequently naked star of "Elf," is becoming a comedic rabbit's foot for filmmakers lucky enough to work with him. When he appears in the new film "Starsky & Hutch," directed and co-written by "Old School's" Todd Phillips, the creaky '70s TV show remake sputters to sudden life after nearly 45 minutes of lukewarm buddy-cop film mechanics.

You wonder, as Ferrell briefly plays a randy convict forcing stars Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson to perform vaguely naughty acts in the prison visitors room ("Be a dragon!" Ferrell hisses, hilariously), why the rest of the film can't be that effortlessly funny.

Indeed, we may have overestimated Phillips, who made a smarter-than-average teen sex comedy called "Road Trip" and the superlatively funny "Old School" last year. How funny would the latter have been, anyway, without Ferrell?

In "Starsky & Hutch," the glut of TV-to-film movies reaches an exhausted nadir. It's a mishmash of '70s homage (screwy hairdos, orange clothes, disco!) and attempt at modern teen-male-demo comedy. It's got Wilson and Stiller, the potent comic team who in "Zoolander" — and on the Oscar stage — have engineered a surfer dude-meets-square putz dynamic that's often reliably hilarious.

In "Starsky & Hutch," their easy chemistry feels more lazy than charming, more forced than funny.

Like the '70s TV show, "Starsky & Hutch" puts together detectives David Starsky (anal retentive) and Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson (easygoing, borderline corrupt) as opposites-attract partners with a yelling, frothing desk sergeant

Along the way, Starsky and Hutch go from annoyed rivals to bestest buddies, bonding mostly over buxom pro football cheerleaders Amy Smart and Carmen Electra. (The women in the film, as seems to be the case in all of Phillips' films, are not women at all; they're clothes racks upon which bikinis, horny-guy ogles and plot contrivances can be applied.) Starsky and Hutch wear ugly clothes and bad wigs and tool around in the show's famous Ford Gran Torino.

If it sounds like a platform for a clever wink to the '70s is in store, perhaps with a dose of knowing homoeroticism between the hunky leads, that level of wit or gamesmanship never emerges.

There are a lot of missed opportunities for laughs in "Starsky & Hutch," and it becomes evident after a while that Phillips wasn't sure whether to play the '70s kitsch straight or to wink, as the first "Brady Bunch" film did, tweaking its well-known TV version by placing its out-of-whack family in a modern setting. While the film expertly retains the grimy, cheap look of cop shows of a bygone era, the story limps from one predictable gag to the next showing signs of energy only occasionally,

As for Stiller and Wilson, their rapport only goes so far. In one disguise, Stiller even recycles a character from the old "Ben Stiller Show." By the end, Wilson seems bored by the whole decade.

There's probably a very funny Stiller/Wilson film in the future, hopefully one the two of them write themselves.

But the stilted "Starsky & Hutch" might become a relic of its own someday — a reminder of a time when studios thought remaking old TV shows into movies was a good idea.

ogallaga@statesman.com; 445-3672