Phillips matches bad filmmaking with bad television from the 70’s.
If bad television from the 70’s and 80’s wasn’t bad enough, now we have bad films about bad shows from our yesteryear to remind us that there are a bunch of literary classic that we could have read instead. After the most recent Charlie’s Angels film finally made kitsch not so kitsch anymore, 30 year old children can now look forward to a slew of film comedies that explore this world of bad taste with the likes The Six Million Dollar Man and The Dukes of Hazard not to far behind in future adaptations. Unfortunately, unimaginative television makes for similar big screen results and the director who gave us gross out teenage pranks and middle-aged men streaking naked in white collar neighborhoods now gives a Gran Ford Torino and bad hair-dos with as little imagination as possible.
In a typical cop gets suspended and gets his badge taken away type of scenario, director Todd Phillips’
Starsky & Hutch leaves much of the attention on the Martin & Lewis comedy duo of Stiller and Wilson, who once again recycle character behaviors from past material. After The Big Bounce, Wilson makes it 2 for 2 in recent boring characters department and not much is puttered out of his sidekick Stiller. Huggy Bear played by rap singer Snoop Dogg may look good, but he simply follows the pimp daddy role as witnessed in about every gangster rap video, basically not much flair or acting talents are present. The plot rests on this Jewish Scarface tongue and cheek bit, not even the supporting cast of Old School crew can help this film from smelling up the screen. Despite a funny child knife throwing sequence, the biggest problem is that there isn’t much revamping or re-imagining done in the script and somehow Phillips forgot that what makes 70’s television such a joy to watch today are the “cheese factorsâ€, such as the sliding over the trunks of the flaming red car, the turning of the red cherries during car chases and the romantic gun battles. Here there is very little of that, instead it is replaced by homoerotic nonsense and bad disco bits.
One of my main complaints with this type of quick-to-green-light and capitalize on hot ideas projects is that the good material is so minimal in the script that the production banks on a couple of novelty items and inflates itself by potentially giving away the film’s best moments for laughter in the trailer. Where Phillips had it right in the past, was his ability to push the envelope with gross out humor, here, the product fails be different from the rest of the pack.
The more film comedies like Starsky & Hutch that get churned out, the more I become convinced that the first Austin Powers movie was a noteworthy and underappreciated film that spoof and era, creates memorable far-fetched personas with gags that pay true homage to fabulously bad moments in history and screen history. The only moment of praise in this film is the throwback to television-produced shows of the 70’s cinematographic design with the famous establishing zoom shots; then again, Spike Jonze’s Beastie Boy video for “Sabotage†is more entertaining than this 90 minutes of trite.