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Ah, the 1970’s—a time
when drugs were abundant, sex had no consequences and detectives
could wear sweaters that looked like smoking jackets without
ridicule. I was barely a lad when "Starsky and Hutch"
hit the television airwaves. I remember the red Ford Torino
racing through the streets of Bay City with impunity, searching
for drug dealers, degenerates, thugs and other perpetrators
of crime. Dave Starsky and Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson
were at the ready to dispense their brand of black and white
justice in a world colored in shades of gray. Sometimes you
gotta do a little wrong, to do alotta right. You dig?
Other than the aforementioned, I have no real recollection
of the show. But that’s why I went to see the movie—as
a short-bus refresher course on the style, lingo and pop culture
of the seventies. I feel like that mongoloid bully at the
back of the class in fifth grade—haven’t I seen
this before? I should know this, shouldn’t I? Oh wait…that
was me.
"Starsky and Hutch" isn’t about the big laughs,
it is about small humor that sometimes parlays into larger
laughs. The people who star in the movie approached each of
their characters from a different angle, creating a fairly
cohesive ensemble. Ben Stiller plays Paul Michael Glaser playing
the role of Dave Starsky. Owen Wilson plays Ken Hutchinson
acting like Owen Wilson. Vince Vaughn plays a megalomaniac
drug dealer who has a weak spot for bad seventies funk. Even
Snoop Dogg plays a balanced pimptascious, funked-up Huggy
Bear. And I was worried, what with the proliferizzle of his
stizzle in mizz-ainstream culture-izzle. Did you see that
AOL commercial? Yizzle.
What we have here is a fairly standard mismatched-buddy-cop
movie sans the dog. More disappointingly, they didn’t
really do a great job parodying the plot inself, i.e. there's
a drug dealer on the loose, a huge deal is about to go down,
and the perp is one step ahead of the cops. Blah blah blah.
For more details, see Lethal Weapon 1 through 5.
It should go without saying that we've seen all the jokes
about the seventies since, well, the eighties. For those needing
a refresher course, there’s a popular television show
called “That 70’s Show." It’s about the
seventies and all the wacky things people did in the seventies,
painted in hues of brown and orange and crazy muttonchop sideburns.
So when Ben Stiller does his little disco dance-off with Ron
Jeremy’s uglier cousin, big stinking deal. The joke is
tired. The laughs do happen, but they come from the quirky
chemistry between Stiller and Wilson, and from Vince Vaughn’s
odd-ball energy, if not the painfully accurate wardrobe and
seventies vibe.
Because a lot of the humor was small, the movie reverted
to homoerotic jokes for the attempts at larger laughs, which
never really paid off. Unfortunately, none of the jokes built
up to a final stunt or provided anything whatsoever to the
subplot, character development or the climax.
Don’t get me wrong, there were some witty scenes during
the course of the movie. Reese Feldman (Vince Vaughn) developed
an odorless, tasteless form of cocaine called New Coke. That’s
funny. It deserves a chortle. Captain Dobey (Fred Williamson)
proclaims that Starksy’s mother was the best officer
Bay City has ever seen. That’s funny too.
Oh…and there were cameos. It seems like every movie
I’ve seen lately has cameos. Apparently, the cameo is
the device Hollywood uses to “funny up” a weak script.
Will Ferrell played a small part as a creepy prison fag. You
say homo-phobic, I say mildly entertaining. Juliette Lewis
played the drug dealer’s mistress. Chris Penn played
Officer Manetti, Starsky’s wiseass nemesis on the police
force. The character didn’t go anywhere, but his appearance
was worth it to see how fat that guy can get. What’s
a matter—spend too much time researching your role at
Dunkin’ Donuts?
And that’s that—you can’t review a cop movie
without a donut joke. It feels good to get that off my back.
I didn’t think I would make it.
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Above:
Huggy Bear explains drug culture to Starsky & Hutch
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