8-Track Flashback
Light and silly it may be, but Starsky & Hutch is pretty lovable
I can pinpoint the exact moment when the big-screen Starsky & Hutch got to me: Ben Stiller is playing uptight cop Starsky, and he tells his partner Hutch, played by the preternaturally laid-back Owen Wilson, that they need to wear disguises for their next assignment. The next shot is of the two of them tooling down the highway, decked out in their Easy Rider finest, riding on choppers as The Band’s “The Weight” plays on the soundtrack for far longer than a simple establishing shot needs to run. Stiller and Wilson looked so silly, yet so sincere, that I started giggling and never really stopped for the rest of the movie.
Stiller’s been coasting too much lately on his perturbed, inarticulate self-doubter shtick, and Wilson hasn’t exercised much better quality control (though The Big Bounce had its moments). Something about Starsky & Hutch must’ve struck a chord in these two, because they’re fully engaged throughout: Stiller’s kicking chairs and smarting off about his keen sense of justice, while Wilson’s so deep in the flow that when two women start making out with him at the same time, he says, “We don’t even have to judge it...it’s just too natural.”
Director Todd Phillips and a team of screenwriters present the film like a typical episode of the old TV show. There’s a plot, having to do with the boys’ attempts to bring down a coke dealer played by the smooth but easily distracted Vince Vaughn, but the movie keeps up with that plot just enough to stay afloat. This Starsky & Hutch is a comedy, but it’s also Phillips, Stiller and Wilson’s fantasy of reliving the ’70s through a show that was jivey and violent enough to impress the kids who watched it, but soft enough not to upset them.
And so the humor of the movie comes from the actors playing the material fairly straight, and letting the clothes and the cars and The Carpenters on the soundtrack get the laughs. It’s kind of a lazy formula, but it works, especially when punctuated by riotous comedy-of-humiliation set pieces, like when our heroes are beset by a knife-throwing 8-year-old, or when the duo dress up as mimes and infiltrate a bat mitzvah (where a band plays Bad Company’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love” to a room full of 13-year-old girls).
I ultimately knew that everyone involved with Starsky & Hutch had a handle on what they were doing when I saw Wilson clutching a copy of Captain America & the Falcon—the faux-tough ’70s comic book series in which a patriot superhero teams up with a streetwise black partner to tackle “socially relevant” crimes. That comic, the original Starsky & Hutch TV series, the tricked-out economy cars, the sexy light rock...it’s a whole stupid aesthetic, and it’s so damned lovable.
—Noel Murray
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