March 5, 2004 | Some very clever and extremely talented people were involved in the making of Starsky & Hutch, presumably because they couldn't find anything better to do than earn an easy paycheck. Unfortunately, the end result of their half-hearted efforts is a dispiriting piece of hackwork that ranks somewhere close to The Mod Squad, I Spy and McHale's Navy on the list of unnecessary and ill-conceived TV-to-movie spin-offs.

Based on the popular 1975-79 TV series about two undercover cops and their souped-up, cherry-red Gran Torino, the movie simply isn't funny enough to work as a flat-out spoof. No kidding: For painfully long, laughter-free stretches, it plays pretty much like… well, a rerun of a '70s cop show. Trouble is, it's no great shakes as a traditional action comedy, either.

In the roles once played in dead-earnest by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul, we now have Ben Stiller as David Starsky and Owen Wilson - who really should have known better, given his experiences with the aforementioned I Spy - as Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson. Working from a script he co-wrote with John O'Brien and Scot Armstrong, director Todd Phillips (Road Trip, Old School) reworks the characters and turns back the clock so that his movie can bring the title characters together for the very first time, in a kinda-sorta prequel to the original series.

In this version, Starsky is a tightly wound, by-the-book workaholic, while Hutch is a mild-and-hazy slacker with a penchant for larceny. All of which means, of course, that Stiller and Wilson have carte blanche to lazily reprise comic shtick that has worked for them before in better, funnier movies.

As the villain of the piece, a cocaine dealer who has devised a more potent and less detectable drug he dubs "New Coke," Vince Vaughn spends most of the movie as though laboring under the delusion that the louder he shouts, the funnier he seems. Maybe we're supposed to assume that his character has been sampling too much of his own product. But, then again, maybe not.

There's some mildly funny riffing on '70s pop culture and sartorial eccentricities, and one genuinely hilarious scene that finds Starsky and Hutch trying to remain professionally blasé while questioning a witness who casually doffs her clothes. A couple of supporting players - SnoopDogg as Huggy Bear, the world's coolest snitch, and unbilled Will Ferrell as a sexually ambiguous convict - earn a few chuckles.

Overall, however, Starsky & Hutch feels like a Saturday Night Live skit that inexplicably has been padded to feature length. The movie goes way beyond being merely forgettable, and actually approaches evanescence: It practically evaporates on the screen while you're watching.