'Mod Squad' should've stayed undercover

By Mike Clark, USA TODAY

Poor Claire Danes spends 94 minutes playing "My So-Called Career" in MGM's almost unreleasable knock-off of the old Mod Squad TV series, which begins by putting dictionary definitions of "mod" and "squad" on the screen and goes downhill from even there.

If you're debating shelling out for this movie or maybe buying a couple cans of Drano, keep thinking: The Avengers.

Danes' partners in banality are Omar Epps (minus Clarence Williams III's old 'fro) and Giovanni Ribisi — who, in the single most savory of recent moviegoing ironies, seems far more mentally handicapped here than in The Other Sister, where he's playing someone who's mentally slow.

In another casting howler, Richard Jenkins plays the detective who initially antagonizes, then later supports, the undercover-cop title trio. It's not easy taking his rantings seriously when you recall how funny he was in his award-winning performance as the gay cop who loves his partner in David O. Russell's uproarious Flirting With Disaster.

The so-called story involves a cache of drugs that disappears from the police evidence locker and the efforts of this formerly law-skirting threesome to solve the crime. If you haven't guessed who the chief heavy is by a third of the way in, don't ever think about passing a civil service exam.

In a strange way, though, the malnourished exposition and cheesy staging actually suggest an MGM exploitation picture from the era of the original Mod Squad. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of movie that launched the studio into a three-decade free fall into cinematic oblivion from which it has never recovered.

Clean up the language, and this little roach of a movie could play the bottom half of a double bill with Rowan and Martin's The Maltese Bippy.

03/26/99- Updated 08:18 AM ET
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