Why? Why did I bother? Because I was thinking it would contain at least a modicum of hipness, coolness, style, or at least fun. Well, luck be a bastard tonight.

Perhaps I shouldn't be writing a review of this movie. Perhaps I should delegate that task to the cupple-a girls in the audience who laughed at every single word Giovanni Ribisi spoke and every little silly face Giovanni Ribisi made. Those girls got a huge kick out of The Mod Squad. Well, good for them! Someone had fun.

This is a best-case example of a worst-case scenario of a dum-dum script wrapped up in clumsy and fractionally-successful directing and "every shot is beautiful" editing. Like most hip cool movies these days, the film starts out right away, leaving you no time to breathe. The opening credits are actually intertwined in the story, which at first is just some narration by Dennis Farina (whose doppelgänger bowls on Sundays at the alley on Pico and 4th). Dennis plays the cop who "hired" the three kiddie wrong-doers to be undercover cops. Well, so you get the kids' backgrounds laid over some snappy but unoriginal graphics, including one of those fonts you see on electronico boom-boom dance music compilation CD covers and skateboard-adhered electronico boom-boom dance music stickers. Then you get some of the electronico boom-boom dance music itself under it all. And then the whole movie just gets worse.

For as hyper as the opening is, much of the rest of the movie is uneventful. Lots of scenes of Claire Danes pining over her obviously crooked ex-boyfriend, who's recently come back into her life. Lots of scenes of Claire and Giovanni bonding. Lots of scenes of the other guy, Omar Epps, just not acting very well because he has nothing to act. BO-RING, my little mod friends! Of course, I do fully support the use of scenes that reveal character and help us get closer to those people on the screen, but, hey, this movie was using it as quite the filler. This could easily have been an hour-long TV episode.

No, I have never seen the TV show. But I doubt that matters.

The plot deals with crooked cops, drugs stolen out of police custody, framed good guys, eccentric drug dealers, and the whole ball of ear wax. The story is so uncreative it's embarrassing. And to make matters much, much worse, the three sapling cops comment on exactly how cliché their situation is. I paraphrase: "Geez. Crooked cops. Drugs stolen out of police custody. Does this shit really happen?" Ha ha! No. Now see, that would work if, like in Scream, the commentaries on cliché provided a launching pad for the plot to take some interesting and unexpected twists and turns. BUT NO! This plot is exactly what the kids can't believe it is. That is not interesting, it's predictable. It's lazy. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Get off your asses, Mrs. Kay and Silver, and try some writing.

There are a few amusing moments in the movie, one of which I'll ruin for you in the following sentence. Giovanni, outrunning an older cop, stops when he realizes the cop has stopped. He walks casually back to the hunched, panting man. He stoops. "How are you?" he asks. "Fine," replies the cop. We find out an eye-blink later that the kids are already undercover and were running to make it look good, so that little joke is kinda funny twice. Ah, but the funnies are few and far between. It's like leaping from one parking lot cement log to another and missing because they're too far apart; you land on the boring asphalt and have to walk to the next log. Pretty soon you just wanna stop jumping at all.

There is nothing surprising, nothing clever, nothing new in this debacle. I feel sorry for all the actors in this one. It may have seemed like a good idea when they signed on, but I'm sure when they finally got a look at the shooting script, their hearts sank so much the National Organ Index took a record tumble. I know my spleen is worth 12% less than it was this time last year.

That's my piece. Avoid this one. Doing so will not only help yourself, it will also help the rest of the world from having to suffer through a sequel, which the makers of this paper weight were obviously hoping to make.

I have been unable to access my website for a couple weeks, so there have been no updates. I think I have that one figured out, though... I've run out of space. Already. So I'm gonna try to delete some unnecessary stuff and cram this review onto my site. Then I'll be shopping around for a place where I can have a huge chunk o' bytes. I'll have to pay, of course, but it may be worth it.

Won't it better if I can in the future give you www.lekowicz.com? Well, that day may be closer than you think.

—Steve

3/29/99

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©1999 Steven Lekowicz