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A Warner Brothers release. Written by Scot Armstrong and Todd Phillips; directed by Todd Phillips; starring Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller and Snoop Dogg. Released to DVD on July 20, 2004.  At first I was tempted to call Starsky and Hutch a forgettable movie-going experience. However, as I thought back on it, I realized that Starsky and Hutch had one notable and unique quality that deserved to be pointed out: director Todd Phillips and the Starsky and Hutch producers spent more time, energy and money camouflaging their film’s horrifically bad script than any other group of filmmakers in recent memory. Based off of the ‘70’s television show of the same name, Starsky and Hutch is about a pair of mismatched cops working as partners. Starsky (Ben Stiller) is a by the book, do-gooder; he actually responds to a prank call about a gumball machine being held up. Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson (Owen Wilson) is a slacker with little regard for the law; the audience is first introduced to Hutch as he is committing armed robbery with a group of criminals. Don’t worry, he gets away with it. Teamed up by their loud, over-bearing captain (Fred Williamson), Starsky and Hutch work together to solve the murder of a small-time drug dealer, aided impressively by their (only) informant, Huggy Bear (Snoop Dogg). When watching most movies, I form some sort of initial opinion based upon the first ten or fifteen minutes of my screening. By that point in time the plot has been established and is underway, the director’s style is evident, the leading actors have defined their roles and the project’s lighting scheme has been set. After nearly an hour of Starsky and Hutch, I realized that I hadn’t had a first impression. I was still waiting for something happen about which to have an opinion. Thanks to Phillips and production designer Ed Verreaux’s (Contact, Jurassic Park III) extreme efforts behind the camera, the film is simply ravishing to watch. Phillips and Verreaux created a fully functioning world unto this movie. Though it’s ridiculous to think that either Starsky or Hutch would get away with anything that they pull here in the real world or that any cops would really use the backwards logic the two do here, on-screen the duos actions mesh very well with their surroundings. If you doubt me on this, consider that at one point in time, Starsky decides to add some "sugar" to his coffee from the kilo of "sugar" that he pulled off a perp on the street. Creating this unique setting is an extremely hard goal for any film to achieve and Phillips nails it here. The trouble is that nothing remotely interesting, funny or exciting happens in the self-contained, silver-screen reality presented here.  Interestingly though, Stiller and Wilson are delightful in their roles. For once, Stiller is not the whiny, mopey character he has played into the ground in previous films like Meet the Parents, Duplex and There’s Something About Mary. Wilson is the perfect choice for the role of Hutch, a likeable slacker (see also The Big Bounce) with surprisingly questionable ethics. Despite their warmth and friendly and almost familial camaraderie though, Starsky and Hutch falls well short of being a positive movie-going experience. Something simply has to happen in order to make a movie worthwhile. There are some sparse moments of genuine comedy scattered throughout the film–nothing along the lines of Phillips’ last picture, Old School however–but the effects of this laughter are negligible on the product as a whole. I’d like to call Starsky and Hutch a bad movie, but the catch is, besides it’s poor script, the film is not overtly bad. If I thought anyone on the production team cared that in this pseudo detective story, our heroes don’t even catch the bad guy, I’d mention it, but the sad truth is that I didn’t really care either. This was bland, bland, bland and poorly paced cinema… that looked really great on-screen.
jackson casey yes, it's true: This marks Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson's sixth project together. |
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