Directed by Todd Phillips. Starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Rated PG.

How far can you go on charm, especially when mixed with a little nostalgia? Look no further than Starsky & Hutch, yet another TV-series spinoff coasting on audience affection. Apparently, quite some distance can be covered if you do your coasting in a bad perm, creased jeans, and a 1976 Ford Gran Torino.

As usual, the flick's "inspiration" was never very good to begin with--a notch above CHiPs, maybe, and a few pokes below The Streets of San Francisco. What really rule here are the set decoration, wardrobe, and hair-styling. Everything else is just background music (with plenty of wah-wah guitar, of course) for a diorama in the museum of moderately popular culture.

Fortunately for people who aren't between, say, 35 and 49 years old, the mannequins here do occasionally come to life. You've got a Brillo-headed Ben Stiller working too hard as uptight undercover man David Starsky, and Owen Wilson not trying at all (thank God) as shaggy-haired Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson--one of the special breed of '70s alternative types, ranging from the Mod Squadí‚ ­ers to Dirty Harry, who could only be police officers in an alternate universe run by studio executives.

Having the most fun (well, not more fun than Hutch has in a lucky-break three-way with cheerleaders played by Amy Smart and Carmen Elektra) is Vince Vaughn as a mustachioed slickster whose charity work masks his heavy traffic in cocaine. (By the way, what has happened to Juliette Lewis, here reduced to ditzy-girlfriend status?) The stuff he's moving is a new, undetectable form, and the plot developments--like almost everything handled by director Todd Phillips (of Road Trip and Old School infamy), who wrote the casually assembled script with two others--when followed at all, only serve to set up a joke or two before dissipating in the genial polyester fog.

More satisfying, sort of, are the film's cameos, with blaxploitation veteran Fred Williamson as the perpetually apoplectic police captain, rapper Snoop Dogg as a pimp-daddy snitch called Huggy Bear, and an uncredited Will Ferrell as a kinky jailbird whose big-house visits offer a new twist on a certain scene from Midnight Express. There are weak-tea attempts to spoof Easy Rider and other films of the era, but S & H is more interested in bringing the show's homoerotic subtext into the main text, to varying effect.

One of the best touches in that regard has Hutch grabbing a guitar to sing a ballad actually recorded back in the day by David Soul, the original Hutch. He's trying to impress the cheerleaders, but it's Starsky who is smitten.

Paul Michael Glaser, Starsky himself, later shows up alongside Soul in a scene that is supposed to cap this creaky muscle-car ride; my preteen kids weren't the only ones in the audience scratching their heads and asking, "Who the hell are those guys?"