Starsky & Hutch (2004)

Todd Phillips's 2004 adaptation of the 1970s television series is a prequel that reverses the personalities of its leads and hands the whole enterprise to the Frat Pack. Ben Stiller plays the uptight one, Owen Wilson the laid-back one, and the plot concerns a drug kingpin, a batch of untraceable cocaine, and a 1974 Ford Gran Torino that ends up at the bottom of Bay City harbor. The film knows exactly what it is. That self-awareness is its entire personality.

On the question of social consciousness, this is a period piece in more ways than one. Snoop Dogg and Fred Williamson appear in supporting roles, which is standard buddy-comedy casting practice from the era and nothing more ambitious than that. Huggy Bear exists as a comic informant, not a vehicle for racial commentary, and the film never asks him to be. The female characters are cheerleaders who disrobe for laughs and a threesome, a treatment that would send a modern studio's compliance department into a long weekend. There is no environmental messaging, no economic critique, no neurodivergent arc, no historical revision, and no sermon delivered to the audience. The drug trade is a plot mechanism. The cocaine is a sight gag involving artificial sweetener. Nobody learns anything about structural injustice, and nobody was meant to.

Strip away the marketing and you have a reasonably funny, thoroughly weightless comedy coasting on the chemistry of its two stars and a nostalgia for a television show most of its audience had never watched. The Gran Torino sinking into the bay carries more emotional weight than any thesis the film might have entertained. It belongs to a moment when a studio comedy could be about two men, a car, and a bad plan, and the culture wars had not yet requisitioned the buddy cop genre. We score it accordingly, and we do so without malice. There is simply nothing here to measure.