STARSKY & HUTCH REVIEW


Verdict:   Another dismal '70s TV-show spoof, ever so slightly redeemed by the loopy chemistry between Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson.

You really don't need to see any more of "Starsky & Hutch" than what was on the Oscars last Sunday, when co-stars and co-presenters Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson exchanged some pretty lame banter while shamelessly plugging their movie.

In this spoof of the '70s buddy-cop TV show, Stiller is Starsky, the intense, anal one, and Wilson is Hutch, the laid-back, goofy one. Vince Vaughn is a drug lord. Will Ferrell has a cameo as a perverted prison inmate. And an impressively smooth Snoop Dogg turns up as the cooler-than-cool snitch Huggy Bear.

This interminable -- and terminally lazy -- effort even goes so far as to recycle a bit from Stiller's own "Zoolander." There, it was a pose-off between two ego-ridden models (played by Stiller and, yep, Wilson); here, it's a dance-off at a disco.

"Starsky & Hutch" contains approximately two good jokes. One has Snoop Dogg reading aloud to a hospitalized kid from "Free to Be You and Me." The other involves a dead pony at a bat mitzvah.

Wilson is proving to be a one-size-fits-all movie buddy. He works as well with Stiller as he did with Jackie Chan in their "Shanghai" movies. And he and Stiller do have an engagingly loopy chemistry. But why not write them an original script, instead of yet another based-on-a-TV-hit, oh-those-crazy-'70s dud?



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