Here's further proof Hollywood's powers that be have no sense whatsoever: Last week, the trade paper Variety reported we'll soon be treated to a "Starsky and Hutch" movie.
Yes, "Starsky and Hutch," that utterly vapid 1970s cop series featuring David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser as undercover cops who regularly cruised discos with their sidekick Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas), a dopey would-be pimp. Has anyone even thought about "Starsky and Hutch" since it left the air 20 years ago? It's just the latest sign that absolutely anything can be turned into big-screen fodder these days, provided it's been done before.
Take, for example, "The Astronaut's Wife," in which pixieish schoolteacher Charlize Theron begins to suspect her husband is not the man he used to be. Although writer-director Rand Ravich doesn't acknowledge as much in the credits, the movie is essentially an update of the 1958 drive-in classic "I Married A Monster From Outer Space," which, like "Invaders From Mars" (1953) and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1955), utilized the prevailing fear of Communism and loss of individuality in a sci-fi context.
In "Monster," newlywed Gloria Talbot is spooked by spouse Tom Tryon's aloofness and the way he and the other men in town gather down at the bar every night simply to talk, not to drink. Eventually, she learns Tryon and most of the other local guys are actually alcohol-intolerant creatures from the planet Andromeda who have stolen human bodies. Their plan is to impregnate women and repopulate Earth with monsters like themselves.
In "Wife," Theron's Jillian becomes pregnant with twins shortly after her husband Spence (Johnny Depp) returns from a space shuttle mission during which he lost contact with mission control for two mysterious minutes. Although joyous at first, Jillian is unnerved by Spence's strange behavior -- including the odd faces he makes after tasting a drink at a party -- and begins to think something might be horribly wrong.
Jillian makes this assumption so early on in the story one might expect Ravich has a big twist up his sleeve, a la "The Sixth Sense." But no. Once it has set its course, the languorous "Wife" lumbers to a wholly predictable conclusion made worse by Ravich's attempt to throw in an unsurprising surprise at the very last minute.
The movie is also handicapped by its casting. Theron, in a role almost identical to her part in "The Devil's Advocate," tries terribly hard but she's not a skilled enough actress to carry a film on her own. She can manage one emotional state per scene, usually tearful shock, which doesn't make for a particularly fascinating character.
Although the always edgy Depp might seem the perfect choice to play a man who may or may not be under an alien influence, the actor has little to do here but stand around looking ominous. He's stifled by the script; Ravich shows us so little of the early Spence it's difficult to determine exactly how much the man has changed.
The other key figures in "Wife" are as run-of-the-mill as they come, including a possibly crazy former NASA exec (Joe Morton), Jillian's hard-luck kid sister (Clea DuVall) and an understanding veteran astronaut's wife (Blair Brown) who counsels Jillian. Only DuVall shows any signs of life, putting a nasty spin on such lines to her sister as "you landed Johnny Rocket Boy and I keep getting different versions of Throws Up On Himself Elmo."
Ravich tries to disguise his well-worn material with bursts of stolen style, having the camera do Brian DePalma-style circles around Jillian in moments of stress or throwing in a weird little MTV-ish episode with Jillian standing perfectly still in a school hallway while children run around her at lightning speed. Perhaps Ravich was so concerned with making the movie look good he forgot about coherence: Those who like to pick out continuity errors will particularly enjoy the sequence in which our heroine ducks into a subway station in the middle of the night and emerges minutes later in the light of day. James Sanford
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