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80A great-looking picture that zips along with grace, light on its feet but possessed of just enough gravity to allow us to take its people rather than its old TV series premise seriously.
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50Has an intriguing cast, a director who knows how to use his camera and a lot of sly humor. Shame about the story. When you see this many of the right elements in a lame movie, you wonder how close they came to making a better one.
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50Curiously enough plays like a 90-minute version of the old television show. That's not necessarily bad.
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50This is the kind of movie that isn't even worth renting when it comes out on video because, with the possible exception of Michael Lerner and Omar Epps dancing to show tunes, you've seen it all before.
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42Presents undercover law enforcement less as a profession than as an accessory, an excuse to pout and glower chicly, to stand around in nightclubs acting like a sullen version of the Last American Rebel.
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It's easy to ignore these knockoff movie versions of retro TV shows, because they're almost always atrociously made. But it can be instructive to watch them because of the template they provide for culture compare-and-contrast between the old show's era and ours.
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30No one expects much from movie adaptations of TV shows but complete incoherence and boredom is a bit too much to bear.
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30Bad, but not criminally so.
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An exercise in robotic filmmaking.
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25You watch the movie in a dumbfounded stupor. Why on earth was it made? [26 March 1999, Friday, p.A]
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25Everyone works hard, but the results are sadly short of style and personality or irony and intelligence.
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25Clean 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.” [26 March 1999, Life, p.9E]
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20Add another one to the scrap heap of trendy, nostalgic, 60's and 70's TV shows reduced to cinematic rubble by the inspiration starved minds in Hollywood.
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20A sketchy, half-baked, stylistically inconsistent movie that scarcely even pretends to care whether it makes sense or not.
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20One of the most mindless, shamelessly lazy films.
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20The story moves so slowly and obviously, you don't even need to be in the theater very much (or your living room when the video comes out) to follow it.
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10Torturously boring.
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10Feels like the most shameless effort yet in the renewed exploitation of the youth market.
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0A flawed fraud, a youth movie so disjointed, witless and condescending that it's painful to watch.
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0Bound to wind up as one of 1999's worst films.
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0Here's what I really like about The Mod Squad: Nobody in it gives a damn.