‘Starsky & Hutch’ remake a lame, uninspired attempt

In theaters

STARSKY & HUTCH, directed by Todd Phillips, written by Phillips, William Blinn, Stevie Long, John O’Brien and Scot Armstrong, 97 minutes, rated PG-13.

The boring new Todd Phillips movie, “Starsky & Hutch,” is based on the spry 1975-79 cop series starring Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. Here’s a tip: If you’re old enough to remember the series and were a fan of it, savor those memories. If you never saw the show and have any interest in seeing it now, catch it on DVD.

But by all means, skip the movie.

Allegedly, this redux is a comedy, though audiences will be hard-pressed to find many laughs. Phillips co-wrote the movie with four other writers, which in no way suggests that they all got in a room and had a great time banging out a script. If they had, their movie likely would have had the energy it lacks and the humor it’s missing.

Instead, when this many people are attached to a script, it’s usually because each successive attempt failed to do the job. Recognizing this, the studio hires script doctors to salvage the material. Looking at it this way, what does it say for “Starsky & Hutch” that the studio recognized five times that the movie was a dud? What does it say for the writers that none of them got it right? It’s not as if they were translating Dostoevsky.

“Starsky & Hutch” is lame and uninspired, for sure, but not only because of its story, which finds the two bumbling detectives tracking a drug lord (Vince Vaughn) with the help of Starsky’s famed Grand Torino. Another reason it bombs is that its stars – Ben Stiller as Starsky and Owen Wilson as Hutch – aren’t playing Starsky and Hutch so much as they’re playing themselves playing Starsky and Hutch.

With their wigs and their hip period drag, they may look the part, sort of, but each has delivered these performances so many times before in better movies, even they seem bored by their own worn-out shtick. Stealing the movie from them is rap star Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear and Carmen Electra as a menage-a-trois tramp. This isn’t something to be proud of, folks.

Comedy is difficult. Good comedies are rare. “Starsky & Hutch” has three noteworthy moments, one of which involves a horse mistakenly gunned down at a bat mitzvah. The scene works because it has an element of surprise.

What don’t work are the film’s broader pieces, such as when our crime-fighting duo appears as mimes to entertain a crowd of stupefied partygoers. Though it obviously wasn’t Phillips’ intent, the children in that crowd were just as silent at the packed screening I recently attended in Orono.

Grade: D

On video and DVD

DUPLEX, directed by Danny DeVito, written by Larry Doyle and John Hamburg, 88 minutes, rated PG-13.

Danny DeVito’s “Duplex,” the dark comedy about how buying a house can destroy your life, stars Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore as Alex and Nancy, a young Manhattan couple longing for roomier quarters but unable to afford them without first moving out of the city and into a more reasonably priced borough.

With the help of their real estate agent, Kenneth (Harvey Fierstein), they find exactly what they’re seeking in Brooklyn, a gorgeous duplex that seems almost too perfect: three fireplaces, original woodwork, period stained glass, rooms the size of small cathedrals, charm, charm, charm.

Sure, living in the upstairs apartment is the widow Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essell), a sweet, elderly woman with a nasty cough who legally can’t be removed from her rent-controlled abode unless, of course, she agrees to move or, in fact, dies. Still, to Alex and Nancy, that cough of hers is especially promising, as is Mrs. Connelly’s advanced age, which teeters somewhere near an obituary-friendly 105.

With the odds stacked in their favor that Mrs. Connelly has knitted her last shawl, Alex and Nancy buy the property, hedging their bets that they’ll soon have the entire duplex to themselves.

But when they move in, Mrs. Connelly actually proves rather spry, just healthy enough to become the tenant from hell, so demanding in her requests for assistance and so impossible in her nighttime antics, that Alex can’t finish his second novel, Nancy gets fired from her magazine job, and both are driven mad to the point of considering murder.

DeVito’s directing career has been a string of outrageous black comedies, with “The War of the Roses,” “Throw Momma From the Train” and “Death to Smoochy” chief among them. He has the sort of twisted sense of humor that touches a nerve we probably would rather not recognize as our own, but which DeVito nevertheless asserts is human. In this case, he takes a typical urban couple, both professionals driven to conquer life’s upward climb, and throws a little old woman in the path to achieving their dreams.

What springs from this may not be DeVito’s best movie, but it does have its moments, a controlled farce that finds Stiller, Barrymore and Essell mining several big laughs while DeVito, the cynic, complicates matters – and deepens the dysfunction – with a final surprise twist.

Grade: B

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He may be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.