In the fall of 2019, while promoting Joker, director Todd Phillips explained in a Vanity Fair interview why he was unlikely to ever make a comedy again: “Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture.” Many people (including Taika Waititi, who had just unveiled a film where he plays Adolf Hitler) found that statement hilarious — perhaps more hilarious than most of Phillips’ comedy output, with one notable exception that has been largely forgotten over the course of two decades: Starsky & Hutch.
Originally released on March 5, 2004, this adaptation of the TV series of the same name remains an outlier in the Phillips canon: his first of two consecutive PG-13 films, in what is otherwise an unabashedly R-rated landscape. And working within those constraints arguably helped produce a better film, as the director, then known for Road Trip and Old School, couldn’t rely on copious amounts of swearing or Amy Smart’s chest (in fact, Smart’s minor role in Starsky & Hutch comes with a certain self-awareness, as she’s one third of a threesome that occurs entirely off-screen).
In adapting the 1970s cop show, to which the film essentially serves as a prequel, Phillips also had a more focused approach compared to the loose structure of his frat-adjacent comedies, enhanced by the existing chemistry between leads Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. In what is, for my money, their finest on-screen collaboration (although Stiller inexplicably received a Razzie nomination for his performance), they inhabit their characters with the right balance of reverential and gently mocking (in an effort to match the performing styles of the actors, the characters’ personalities were switched compared to the TV version).
The film is at its best when it’s the two of them working out their differences while trying to solve a fairly straightforward case involving a drug dealer (a suitably villainous Vince Vaughn), with some assistance from Hutch’s informant Huggy Bear (Snoop Dogg, perhaps the most inspired piece of casting in a role that plays on his pimp persona in a PG-13 setting). When it occasionally veers into more openly outlandish territory, mainly via Will Ferrell’s uncredited cameo as a perverted inmate, we’re never far away from getting back on track (the way Ferrell’s character exits feels like another joke at the expense of the scenes one would usually find in Phillips’s raunchier stories).
The compromise between commercial constraints (Phillips even sacrificed a stunt involving ninja stars once he realized that would have entailed an 18 certificate in the UK) and the filmmaker’s comedy instincts is perhaps best summarized in the opening line of the trailer. As the late, great Don LaFontaine put it, “Detective David Starsky always did everything by the book. Detective Ken Hutchinson never even read it.” The film does everything by the book, but occasionally writes in a little extra joke in the margins, hitting the right irreverent note without going overboard.
In the end, the most irreverent idea was perhaps having all the ingredients in place for a sequel that never materialized, despite unqualified commercial success (it grossed $170 million worldwide, almost three times its $60 million budget). That detail still smarts today, especially when one considers the sequels Stiller and Wilson did make are a couple of Night at the Museum follow-ups and, even more depressingly, the uninspired Zoolander 2.
Viewed today, Starsky & Hutch has aged remarkably well, as it places character work ahead of gratuitously edgy material, while still retaining an ability to cross the line in an intelligent manner (the pony scene, which earned praise from Roger Ebert, makes me chuckle even as I merely type these words). Again, it’s an outlier in the Phillips catalogue, and arguably the type of material he should consider revisiting if he were to change his mind about leaving comedy behind.
The problem is not audiences getting offended, as evidenced by the fact Family Guy and South Park are still going strong (and the likes of Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais still get to tell taboo-busting jokes in their Netflix specials). The issue is some of Phillips’s humor, much like James Gunn’s infamous attempts at being edgy on Twitter, was not that funny to begin with, and has aged poorly in the interim. Unlike Gunn, though, Phillips appears unwilling to move on from those ill-judged comedic instincts — which is ironic, considering that less than a year after releasing Starsky & Hutch, he walked off the set of Borat because he found that too extreme even by his standards…
“Starsky & Hutch” is available for digital rental or purchase.
