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"The premise of all comedy is a man in trouble." That's from someone who should know -- Jerry Lewis, inveterate pratfaller, trailblazer for Carrey and Sandler, and, yes, cinematic genius (you heard me). After recently slogging my way though a couple of would-be romps, however, I'm inclined to say "trouble" is no longer the essence of film comedy, but its very situation. Judging by the scarcity of laughs, "extinction" is closer to the mark. This kind of sour grapes article is not exactly cheery for me to write, because I love to laugh and needed a break after agonizing for my sins in Mel Gibson's viscera-soaked catechism lesson. So I booked back-to-back screenings of Eurotrip and Starsky & Hutch, hoping to get a generous fix for my dumbed-down, gross-out, frat-party comedy addiction. Four grim hours later, I was longing for the comic wit and subtlety of, say, Pauly Shore. The cheeky satirical newspaper The Onion once rechristened President Bush's unabashedly imperialistic "Operation: Iraqi Freedom" as "Operation: Piss Off the Planet," and, according to Eurotrip, everybody is still mad at us. And no wonder -- the film is less a trip through the continent than a trek through the laziest European stereotypes, from England (bad-ass hooligans) to France (snooty whimsy) to Italy (groping lechers) to Holland (drugs 'n' sex mecca). For completism's sake there is even a detour for ravaged Eastern Europe, just to remind us how hilarious those starving, bombed-out Baltic dwellers can be. Lamely directed by Jeff Schaffer (writer of last year's unwatchable The Cat in the Hat), Eurotrip follows a quartet of American nitwits (Scott Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts, Michelle Trachtenberg, Travis Wester) backpacking across the Old World and getting into scrape after scrape with soccer bruisers, hash brownies, mimes, the Pope, et al. The humor is too timid to be offensive -- had a bad-taste auteur like John Waters pushed its limits, the movie would have at least showed a little verve, maybe satirizing American isolationism rather than simply displaying it. The little fun I squeezed out of Eurotrip came incidentally, such as its use of young TV starlets for shameless titillation -- Trachtenberg, whom I recall only as a chipmunky moppet in Nickelodeon kids' shows, has bloomed here into a pretty hot little number, and the only cast member with any charm. And I also enjoyed the movie's general horniness, which in practically every teen comedy is a coy come-on but here flows freely. Of course, what would the libido be without its counterpart, homophobic panic? For every scene of hot babes parading topless or a guy scoring the easiest blowjob I've ever seen outside of a porno, there is one of the fellas mistakenly stumbling across a male nude beach. These two impulses fuse, rather stunningly, in an Amsterdam sex den where Lucy Lawless (TV's Xena) presides as an über- dominatrix and makes Pitt's sub-David Spade wiseass sweat a bit. That I-gotta-get-laid undercurrent is mostly straitjacketed in Starsky & Hutch, a far slicker piece of tomfoolery. I guess '70s nostalgia will never die (not while it rakes in big bucks, anyway): after The Mod Squad, Charlie's Angels and S.W.A.T., now it's time to resurrect the Paul Michael Glaser-David Soul TV opus. I never saw the original show, though I doubt it makes a difference, since the movie version is less interested in "homage" than in making funky digs at the times (funky afros, platform shoes, leather jackets, disco dance-offs) and trying to convince viewers yet again that Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are the comic duo of the new millennium. The appropriately cheesy plot follows neurotic straight-arrow Starsky (Stiller) and breezy slacker Hutch (Wilson), mismatched cops closing in on a smarmy Mr. Big (Vince Vaughn in a Johnny Wadd mustache) and a nefarious plot for odorless cocaine. Despite valiant efforts by director Todd Phillips (Road Trip, Old School) to punch up the gags, effervescence is in short supply here. At one point, S & H try to keep their cool while interrogating a shapely suspect who happens to be undressing in a locker room -- wasn't this type of comedy already old when the show first came out? And why bring in Snoop Dogg as superfly pimp snitch Huggy Bear if he is just going to give another round of his stoned-fox persona? Despite my allergy to Ben Stiller's jittery hostility (which is too bad for me, since he's in about seven movies a year), a little fun leaked in from the edges: cuties Carmen Electra and Amy Smart in tight cheerleader outfits, a throwaway gag about cumbersomely outsized undercover equipment.
Mostly, however, I kept wondering. Why the skimpy towels daintily draped around the guys' waists? Why the Easy
Rider reference? Why Will Ferrell as the big perv with a thing for dragons? Yes, the big joke of the movie is that
Starsky and Hutch, for all the hair and the guns, are really in love with each other but too dumb to notice. Homophobic
humor is as tedious here as it was in Eurotrip, though it does culminate with Wilson sweetly warbling "Don't Give Up
on Us" to a blithely coked-up Stiller. With the right editing (and some courage), the sequence could have been as
subversive as the "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me" Dean Martin-Ricky Nelson duet from Rio Bravo. As it is, it's nothing
more than a couple of guys in dorky perms playing footsie, setting movie comedy back at least half a century.
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