Starsky & Hutch
dir. Todd Phillips
Warner Bros.

Starsky and Hutch is advertised as "A Todd Phillips Movie." Why, exactly, does the directorial vision of Todd Phillips deserve special notice? His previous efforts are limited to Road Trip and Old School, which at a cursory glance are rather inconsequential. But both films have moments that transcend the typical big dumb comedy.

In Road Trip, the big dumbness includes turning Seann William Scott loose in a sperm donor clinic to experience the glory of orgasm via prostate massage, but Phillips' use of Tom Green is truly, oddly transcendental. The director understands that Green's insanity is just a really good poker face that creates the sort of uneasy comedy that Andy Kaufman perfected. Phillips gives Green the stock role of the guy who's been on campus five years too long, but instead of pigeonholing Green into playing a hornball, Phillips hands him an extended sequence with a python. The snake won't eat, so Green tries to demonstrate by sticking the rat in his mouth first; then he sweet talks the snake, trying to charm it; and finally, frustrated (most likely, by being an undersexed creepy old guy still living in a dorm), Green screams "Unleash the fury!" at the snake while a hottie co-ed looks on. It's a moment that only Green could have pulled off — but considering Green's disastrous turn in Stealing Harvard, it's clear the director has a lot to do with it too.

Old School is more frustrating. Again, Phillips is dealing with a unique comic persona in Will Ferrell, and, for the most part, the director manages the scenes successfully. Who can forget Ferrell's streaking, rythmic gymnastics routine or his locker room freak-out ("We've got to keep it together out there!")? But you leave Old School wanting something more. There's such existential frustration in Vince Vaughn's stereo-speaker tycoon, but Phillips doesn't flesh out the character. Is he castrated by his wife? Or by his newfound wealth? When he turns down a sure shag with a hot college chick, we glimpse an internalized dilemma, but the character ultimately goes nowhere. If it had, you could argue that there's absurdist profundity in the image of Vaughn sitting at his kid's birthday party, chain-smoking and cussing in a full clown suit and make-up. But you can't because Old School opts for really fat guys doing gymanstics when it should have been a sort of Ivan Reitman Fight Club. There are moments when Ferrell's post-marriage angst is genuinely heartbreaking. In the end, however, Old School panders to the American Pie crowd when it doesn't need to. Phillips obviously understands the pain and drama lurking underneath its juvenile regression, but you walk away with the feeling that the studio would rather just make its bucks from the pie-fucking crowd than allow the director very much creative freedom.

That's the problem with Starsky and Hutch: There's not enough ambition. Its producers are content with letting Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson do their shtick and dressing Snoop Dogg in pimp suits. Like Phillips' other movies, the subtext is right there, ready for comic gold, like Old School's Gen X male angst and Road Trip's college-age separation anxiety. But also like them, this film is just a cobbled together series of gags, each hoping to be funny enough to win enough laughs to score substantial box office.

Phillips' idea is to deconstruct "Starsky and Hutch," and by extension the entire buddy cop genre, as a repressed homosexual fantasia. That could have worked, but the idea is isolated to Stiller's few longing gazes at Wilson and some vaguely homoerotic images, like Stiller biting into a footlong hot dog. Phillips positions Wilson's Hutch as the randy playboy who grows to look out for and, as it turns out, love his adorably obsessive-compulsive partner. Stiller's Starsky is, of course, the by-the-book cop whose repressed mojo is contained entirely within the way he handles his car. Within these characterizations, Phillips' feel for weird comedy shines through: After Stiller reprimands Wilson for putting a drink on the roof of the Gran Torino, the camera focuses on Stiller's grimace as he grips the hell out of the steering wheel. We hear an extended screech of the tires, and Phillips positions the camera so that we see the Torino whip around, the back end fishtailing perfectly into the opposite lane. In fact, Starsky can't park the Torino without whipping that sucker into the spot, tires squealing and smoke enveloping the auto. The similar scenes in Malcolm Lee's Undercover Brother are the epitome of cool, but there's a lot of repression in this image — which is clearly what Phillips is going for ("Don't pretend to be somebody you're not," Starsky advises some cute little blonde kids), but as with the rest of his movies, the narrative leaves the idea only half-developed.

There are a few other gleeful moments, as when Stiller shoots a little girl's pony, but they're unconnected to Phillips' themes. The whole film feels overproduced and overwritten (there are four writers and eight producers involved), and Phillips doesn't do a good job directing his stars. They pretty much play their personas in every scene, unconcerned about any sort of consistency or depth. Granted, this is a film that pays homage to Caddyshack by staging a car chase on a golf course, but there are enough details to make the case that Phillips has potential for so much more. Who else would have scored Snoop Dogg's scenes with the original '70s R&B songs he's sampled his hits from? What about Snoop's bejeweled iguana, or the curb feelers on his Cadillac? Or Vince Vaughn's porn star mustache? Phillips even demonstrates a talent for composition: Hutch's drab, primer-colored house is stuck at the end of a dead-end street, in a yard of unmowed grass, walled off from a factory billowing smoke.

Really, you don't get that from Steven Brill, who staged a fiery rescue in Mr. Deeds with a single flaming box of Special K, or Peter Segal, whose idea of shrewdness is casting Rob Schneider in a supporting role in 50 First Dates. Phillips has shown enough vision in his first three films to warrant some creative freedom for his next, a remake of The Six Million Dollar Man starring Jim Carrey. The idea of a nuclear-resurrected Carrey has loads of potential, both for brilliance and disaster. Unfortunately, the film will probably be tailored to try to make Bruce Almighty money. Comedy fans need to hope that this next "A Todd Phillips Movie" has producers willing to give him the room to make the great movie he has in him.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)