Starsky & Hutch (2004)
Directed by Todd Phillips
Join uptight David Starsky and laid-back Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson as they're paired for the first time as undercover cops. The new partners must overcome their differences to solve an important case with help from street informant Huggy Bear and persuasive criminal Reese Feldman.
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What critics compared Starsky & Hutch to
Indeed, they have, as even the idea of turning a decades-old television crime drama into a self-consciously wink-wink parody of itself was already done almost a decade ago with Starsky & Hutch (2004).
Another way is go about things the way Todd Phillips did with Starsky & Hutch : transform it into a comedy/parody.
What puts "21 Jump Street" ahead of the "Starsky & Hutch" movie a few years back, for example, is a simple matter of modesty and scale.
Like the equally irreverent film version of Starsky & Hutch , 21 Jump Street is less interested in recycling the conventions of the show it’s ostensibly adapting for the big screen than in exaggerating them for comic effect.
Right from the get-go, we know we’re in for a rockin’ and rollin’ ride thanks to the opening title song giving us a kind of vintage Matt Helm vibe which composer Clinton Shorter then plays upon giving us a score that at times has an almost Starsky & Hutch feel.
What it doesn't say is that Phillips was also responsible for the hopelessly inane "Road Trip," "Starsky & Hutch," and "Hangover II."
The period detail is perfect, from the worn out furniture in this worn-out working class house to the fashions, posters on the kids’ walls (“Starsky & Hutch,” The Bay City Rollers and Joanna Lumley) and vintage British cars under the muddy-gray skies.
What's more, Wan and production designer Julie Berghoff do a splendid job of capturing the dankness and decay of this sort of public housing prevalent at the time (and nice touch with the Starsky & Hutch posters in the two daughters' shared bedroom).
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And so a younger generation is finding new stupid things to do underneath the desert sun: roofies in the Jägermeister, stealing Mike Tyson's tiger, etc. Director Todd Phillips (School for Scoundrels, Starsky & Hutch) treats Las Vegas as a wonderland of product placement, and rightly so.
The comedy follows the formula of many other films based on TV procedurals (think “Starsky & Hutch,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “21 Jump Street”) by taking a winking approach to the original show’s signature moments.
Director Todd Phillips breaks away from his usual comedic fare, such as "Old School," "Road Trip" and "Starsky & Hutch" to take on what could be considered the reverse negative of a comedy.
It feels incredibly odd to weigh what is ostensibly a comic book film against all-timers of the Hollywood canon – directed by the visionary mastermind behind Starsky & Hutch , no less – but that’s the thing: this is far from your average Marvel popcorn flick.
Phillips, who the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, is perhaps the unlikeliest of sources for both this tone and material seeing as his previous studio efforts consisted of The Hangover trilogy, Starsky & Hutch (2004), Due Date (2009) and War Dogs (2016).
But, no, I guess it’s not surprising that the director of Starsky & Hutch couldn’t quite pull off this pretty ambitious task.
…o Starsky & Hutch coescribe un guion con Scott Silver, autor de filmes como El peleador (2010) o 8 Mile: Calle de ilusiones (2002), cuya libertad sólo había sido vista en la trilogía dirigida por Christopher Nolan de 2002 a 2012.
En la exploración de ese personaje (un perdedor entre los perdedores) se encuentra lo más interesante de Joker, dirigida y co escrita por Todd Phillips (Starsky & Hutch, ¿Qué pasó ayer?) y Scott Silver (El luchador, 8 millas) pues por momentos quiere dejar entrar un poco de luz no sólo sobre el origen de lo que manipula a Arthur, esa maldad que no es ni resentimiento (aunque se vincule a él), ni sobrenatural (aunque la risa le de ese toque) pero que dado todo a lo que se enfrenta conforme su padecimiento se agudiza parece intrínseca al ser humano, inevitable.
The demonic and angelic free agents scouring Earth for prizes can meet and relax at a "neutral" bar presided over by Midnight (Djimon Hounsou), who is a slightly more dignified version of Snoop Dogg in "Starsky & Hutch."
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There really wasn't any reason to expect good things from 2012's 21 Jump Street, since such TV-to-film adaptations as Starsky & Hutch, I Spy and Dark Shadows suggested that this wholesale mining of boob-tube nostalgia clearly has its limitations.
In fact, Phillips’s CV as both a director and producer reads like a syllabus for the most dedicated scholars of the bro-sthetic: Old School, Starsky & Hutch, Road Trip, Project X.
The Phillips-directed “Old School” is one of the most replayable comedy hits of the last two decades, and “Road Trip” and “Starsky & Hutch” are both underrated.
Ever since his first comedy, the consciously junky neo-’80s youth bash “Road Trip” (2000), he has never looked back, churning out unabashed throwaways that were sometimes funny (“Old School”) and sometimes not (“Starsky & Hutch”), and becoming a major-league Gen-X voice with the “Hangover” trilogy.
There is a clear aesthetic difference between the Hangover trilogy and Due Date in comparison to Road Trip , Old School and Starsky & Hutch , with Phillips' later work crafting humor from darker, more dramatic, and occasionally disturbing places.
They run afoul of Albanian gangsters, international embargoes, spouses’ prying eyes, internal betrayals and a shady colleague (Bradley Cooper, doing his buddy Phillips a solid even as he seems to think he’s in a perilously serious version of “Starsky & Hutch”).