I bumped up my rating of The Mod Squad a half-star when I remembered that Claire Danes performed one scene in her underwear. Sadly, director Scott Silver's camera does not linger on the disrobed Danes--his camera doesn't linger much on anything in this dizzyingly awful garage fashion show of a movie. Although The Mod Squad is based on a television show, it never hangs on an image for more than the length of a channel-flip.

Danes, Giovanni Ribisi, and Omar Epps, Jr. star as "the Mod Squad"--three juvenile delinquents forgoing jail time by assisting the cops. Because they're young, detectives believe they have mystical abilities to "get into places we can't," like dance clubs and car washes(?). After their boss (Dennis Farina, in a brief cameo) is murdered (the scene is edited and lit in such a way that dialogue is required to determine just who the corpse belongs to), the trio goes in search of his killer.

I couldn't count The Mod Squad's plot holes with a calculator. (My biggest beef: Danes' 'devoted' lover (Josh Brolin)--one of the bad guys--keeps a bevy of girlfriends in his apartment who also answer his phone, so why does he invite Danes to call him whenever she feels the urge?) That not a single interesting character inhabits the storyline is due in part to the miscasting of all three leads, especially Danes, taking over the Peggy Lipton role of Julie, a teenage runaway and recovering alcoholic. The furthest this Barbie Doll ever fled from her home was to Bloomingdale's.

I've been a fan of Ribisi's ever since his charismatic stint on the short-lived sitcom "Davis Rules", but he's nigh intolerable in The Mod Squad--he mocks his own C-movie dialogue by shouting every line. At least Danes and Ribisi appear to be having fun: Epps, Jr. is incapable of mustering a smile. (Granted, I sympathize.)

Did Silver intend to poke fun at the original series, which ran in the early seventies, or pay homage to it? The retro clothing, unanimously awful performances, and blaxploitation music on the soundtrack point in either direction. In discussing the movie afterwards with a friend, I voiced my complaint that we weren't dispensed enough information about this Mod Squad at the outset--they are thrust into partnership with the police before they've been sketched in as characters. I've since changed my tune: a prologue would only make this film longer, and I don't think I could have sat through another second of The Mod Squad. Unless there were more underwear scenes.-Bill Chambers