During its inauspicious four year run, the TV series "Starsky & Hutch" was never a huge hit; though it did land at an impressive number 15 in the Nielsen ratings its first year (1975-76), the numbers declined steadily thereafter. It was never a particularly good show and in the ensuing years it has never really had much of a cult following (except, maybe, among gay audiences who imagined more in the Starsky-Hutch relationship than was ever intended -- something immortalized in a Halloween episode of "Will & Grace"). Indeed, much of the success of the show could be attributed to the fact that the proverbial pair of mismatched cops it featured drove a tricked out Ford Gran Torino -- an otherwise uncool make of car which somehow became cool because it was given a remarkably ugly red-and-white paint job. Yet, neither particularly admired for its quality nor beloved for its unintentionally humorous mediocrity, the show has lingered in our consciousness, even as many that were far better and more original have faded into oblivion. Even so, it is hard to imagine that there was ever a great demand for it to be turned into a big screen movie.<br /><br />It does, however, deserve some credit; the show did strive for a bit of grittiness in the style of THE FRENCH CONNECTION. In an era when most TV cop shows were slick and glib and sometimes striving for a touch of glamor, "Starsky & Hutch" moved around in a world of pimps and prostitutes, drug pushers and lowlifes. It tried to maintain a sense of realism, or at least what could pass as realism on network television in the 1970s. Therefore, just as there is no real reason for a Starsky & Hutch movie to exist, it is a further puzzlement that the one quality that gave the TV show any distinction or purpose, it's rough-edged quality, is the one thing the movie version immediately jettisoned.<br /><br />The film is less about the series than it is about all the untold number of gritty buddy-cop films that have come and gone along the way, from FREEBIE AND THE BEAN to LETHAL WEAPON and even SEVEN. The movie also takes shots at the disco-dazed trendiness of the seventies, a quality that was also never a big part of the series. Thus, the humor in STARSKY & HUTCH is so generic and so broad that it jumps past satire and instead goes directly into parody, ending up little more than an extended version of the type of skits that "The Carol Burnett Show" used to stage. Without the trademark Gran Torino, the characters played by Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson could just as easily have been named Smith and Jones -- or Hope and Crosby. Indeed, the two characters' personas were deemed so inconsequential that essentially Stiller and Wilson opted to simply play themselves -- or at least dust off their well-used screen images -- rather than to even attempt to find something unique about the characters played by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul on TV.<br /><br />It may be just as well. But if the original series was so bereft of any distinctive element on which to hang a full length feature, then it only increases the pointlessness of the movie as a whole. Like so many TV-to-movie translations, the film has no real interest in the source material beyond exploiting its pre-sold title and recycling a few trademark bits of trivia as jokes -- like dragging in Glaser and Soul for self-mocking cameos. Otherwise, there's nothing in STARSKY & HUTCH that hadn't already been mocked, and with much greater skill and wit, by Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson in NATIONAL LAMPOON'S LOADED WEAPON 1, a comedy that had the sense to know that merely repeating clichés is not the same as making fun of them.