The movie starts
with great monologues from both lead actors.
Starsky (Ben Stiller) goes first. His monologue tells us he believes the city
pays him well enough to justify jumping off buildings and risking his life to
catch bad guys.
Hutch (Owen Wilson), on the other hand, is a “if you can’t beat them, join
them” kind of guy. He thinks the city doesn’t pay him enough to risk his life,
so he decides to be a petty criminal—oh, and he does this while still being an
officer of the law.
The pairing is
magical: one over-the-top, by-the-book cop, and the other completely unaware of
any legal rules.
What you’d expect from this duo is that the rule-breaker would be willing to do
anything to stop a crime, but not in this movie. The unruly one is ready to do
anything to be part of the crime—if he gets paid. Meanwhile, his partner
follows the rules to the extreme, even if it means causing nonsense and
financial damage to the city and its citizens to solve a crime.
This weird mix
makes the movie very interesting. The bad guy, Feldman (Vince Vaughn), is a
drug dealer who commits murder on his yacht because his man messed up a drug
shipment. The body falls into the sea.
The shipment is a new type of cocaine worth millions of dollars, which he and
his partner, Kevin (Jason Bateman), are planning to bring into the U.S.
They’ve
developed a new type of cocaine that’s untraceable by search dogs and tastes
different but still gives the same high as regular cocaine.
Starsky and
Hutch are called to a crime scene where the body of the murdered man is found a
few days later.
A clue on the man’s body leads our dynamic duo to Feldman. Feldman, of course,
denies the crime, but the case has started, and these two—mostly Starsky—are
wound up tight about solving it. Hutch could care less about the crime.
The movie was
met with positive reviews, though some criticized Stiller’s acting, which I
thought was fine. The movie also made more than its share at the box office,
but I guess not enough for the studio to greenlight a sequel to this funny
film.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing this movie, you should. It’s funny to
a fault, and Owen Wilson is at his best here.
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