HERE's the hitch with Starsky And Hutch, the take-off from the Seventies' cop series.

Just as many girls fancied Paul Michael Glaser, the permed one, as David Soul, the blond one who sang too. Does anyone fancy Ben Stiller, comic nerd, aside from Stiller's David Starsky himself?

Stiller has the hair, the walk, the hot-dog chewing, and even the jumper, and if Todd Phillips's movie were a spoof a whole spoof and nothing but a spoof, Stiller's comic turn would be just dandy, but Starsky And Hutch wants it all ways. It is both spoof and re-make and so Stiller's uptight, unlovable schtick does not wholly satisfy.

Much like the movie itself, which is both reverent and irreverent but really needs to go one way or the other. Reverent would have been facile and pointless, dull too; an update for the 21st century would have backfired like The Italian Job; a re-imagination of the original could have ended up like The Avengers folly.

So, a spoof has to be the best option but unlike Mike Myers' Austin Powers parodies or the Zucker Brothers, Phillips seems reluctant to stick in the satirical knife.

What he gives you is a lightly entertaining action comedy that keeps Starsky And Hutch in the Seventies, gives them a hardly taxing case to solve and stirs good memories of dodgy fashions and the Ford Torino car that was Starsky's obsessive joy.

Phillips builds his Starsky And Hutch around the comic interplay of the chalk-and-cheese Stiller, short and wound up as a clock, and Owen Wilson, the relaxed babe magnet.

Thrown together as a new partnership on the case of drug dealer Reese Feldman (Vince Vaughn, moustache, perm, perma-tan and all), they clash with each other and with Bay City police boss Captain Dobey (Fred Williamson), while using the services of hip contact Huggy Bear (rapper Snoop Dogg) at every opportunity.

Stiller's Starsky plays it by the book, Wilson's Hutch bends the law his way, sweeping the ladies off their feet when recruiting cheerleaders Carmen Electra and Amy Smart to assist him in more ways than solving the case.

Starsky And Hutch is breezy, light on its feet and happy to look as good as Huggy Bear but it has nothing to say about Seventies' television, and nor does it bring anything new to the party. This is a buddy movie that gets the job done with just enough laughs to predict a sequel.

Updated: 08:54 Friday, March 19, 2004