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Another tried and occasionally true method of stoking the Proustian flame is to resurrect a much-loved TV series. Trouble is, it's now been tried so many times that only the most irrevocably desiccated corpses remain in the coaxial graveyard. Witness, for example, The Mod Squad, a painfully inept update of the late-'60s-early-'70s cop drama in which three young hoodlums (Claire Danes, Omar Epps, Giovanni Ribisi) are recruited as undercover police officers. Divorced from its original context of Vietnam-era uneasiness about rebellious adolescents — the filmmakers have to define ''mod'' on screen for their target audience — the movie makes no sense, a fact that director-cowriter Scott Silver underlines with a cops-on-the-take plot that is somehow both mindless and impossible to follow. Worse, the titular trio come across less like dangerous delinquents than like jet-lagged fashion models — especially Danes, whose ''hard as they come'' reformed drug addict spends the entire flick biting her lower lip and gazing moistly into the distance. Imitation, it seems, isn't always the sincerest form of flattery.

Go: B+
200 Cigarettes: D+
The Mod Squad: F

Originally posted Sep 03, 1999 Published in issue #501 Sep 03, 1999 Order article reprints
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