FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Film by FFWD Staff The Mod Squad When will they stop thinking that someone would want to pay $8.50 to watch a crappy old TV show? Especially if you aren’t even going to put the effort in to make it better. Mod Squad the movie doesn’t even try to come up with a more plausible premise than Mod Squad the TV show. The early lame attempt to explain the inexplicable choice of three buffoons taken out of their jail cells and made into cops is ridiculous. "These kids can get into clubs we can’t." Yeah, so what? Once they get into those clubs they screw around, neck in the can, and blow their cover. There isn’t a La Femme Nikita among them. Poor old Claire Danes is Officer Are-You-Okay, Giovanni Ribisi is Officer Pseudo-Psycho-Moron, and Omar Epps is Officer Stoic-Bland. Neither character knows the first thing about getting information out of anyone. None of them has any particular skill that would indicate that they would be a benefit to society, never mind the people who are supposed to protect society. The only things missing from their idiotic antics are big wooden planks to swing around madly hitting and missing each other’s heads. The plot was phoned in from TV land. The kids are stuck in the middle of some bad ass cops who would like to see them gone (no more so than the audience) in order to continue with their drug racket. All these cops are big ol’ clichés of bad. But just so we know that they know this is all kitschy TV-cop-show weirdness, the three heroes frequently mention how odd the whole thing really is. Once their cop mentor isn’t there to protect them anymore, the Mod Squad decides to crack this case themselves. They do this by: letting perps go, sleeping with pimps, visiting their parents, crashing cars, hugging, staking out a guy’s place (and after several shots are fired they can’t figure out their guy was killed), throwing their guns away in the middle of a big gun fight, and, for most of the movie, not trusting the other pigs, but then at the last minute they do again. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen all the best lines in the film. And best is a relative term. |
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