MOVIE REVIEW
'Starsky' amounts to amusing, recycled spoof

By Christie Lemire
Associated Press Entertainment Writer

STARSKY & HUTCH PG-13 2 Stars From left, Snoop Dogg, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson get down with the crime in a remake of the 1970s TV show "Starsky and Hutch." This is the sixth time Stiller and Owen have teamed up on the big screen. Warner Bros.

For now, you can sit back and watch the sporadically amusing, comfortably numbing familiarity of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson bouncing off each other in "Starsky & Hutch."

It's not so much a movie version of the 1970s buddy-cop TV show as it is "Zoolander" with guns. Here, as in that 2001 movie about dimwitted male models, Stiller plays the uptight guy who takes himself way too seriously and Wilson plays the easygoing guy who everyone likes.

That these off-screen friends have established such an easy on-screen camaraderie is a good thing and a bad thing. They're obviously comfortable with each other and they can be fun to watch, though the script amounts to little more than a series of sketches, loosely held together by the grooves of a chicka-chicka-wa-wa soundtrack and the growls of Starsky's Gran Torino engine.

But Stiller (who plays Starsky) and Wilson (Hutch) have fallen into a predictable rut following nearly identical performances in "Meet the Parents," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and, most recently, "Zoolander."

Instead of male models, they play undercover cops who look like male models — or, rather, like male models look today in emulating the style Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul cultivated on the TV series nearly three decades ago, with sunglasses that were too big and jeans that were too small.

"Old School" director Todd Phillips, who co-wrote the script with John O'Brien and his "Road Trip" writing partner Scot Armstrong, goes truly old school here, and the attention to detail is obsessive — from the bad perms and fu manchu mustaches to the 8-track tapes and pimped-out Lincoln Continental that Snoop Dogg drives as Huggy Bear, Starsky and Hutch's informant.

(Snoop is a natural choice for the role, by the way, if only because he appears to have provided his own wardrobe.)

But the novelty of gawking with horrified fascination at the superfly style of the times grows old quickly, and the fact that this is a one-joke movie becomes painfully obvious after about 45 minutes — at which point, you're only about halfway done.

There is some semblance of a story line, though, and it entails showing us how opposites Starsky and Hutch ended up as partners on the mean streets of Bay City.

While investigating a murder, they begin to suspect the wealthy Reese Feldman (Vince Vaughn), a drug kingpin who has developed a special strain of cocaine ("New Coke," if you will) that's impossible for drug-sniffing dogs to detect.

Really, though, the case is just an excuse for Starsky and Hutch to play dress-up.

They pretend they're bikers in an "Easy Rider" take-off and play mimes to infiltrate Feldman's daughter's bat mitzvah. They even go to a disco with a couple of cheerleaders (Carmen Electra and Amy Smart) who may have information on the killing. (While they're there, Starsky competes in a dance-off that's a rip-off of the "walk-off" he participated in as Derek Zoolander).

But it's clear that Starsky and Hutch only have eyes for each other; if the TV show had a vague homoerotic vibe, the movie practically outs them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But speaking of "Seinfeld," here's an idea: Maybe Stiller and Wilson will play movie versions of Jerry Seinfeld and Cosmo Kramer in 20 years.

"Starsky & Hutch," a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG-13 for drug content, sexual situations, partial nudity, language and some violence. Running time: 97 minutes. Two stars out of four.