Ben Stiller's comedy Zoolander is as vapid and self-serving as the world it tries to spoof.
Zoolander showcases the character Stiller created for the 1996 Vogue Fashion Awards. It worked wonderfully that particular night because Stiller was satirizing male models at a fashion show and because the skit lasted all of five minutes.
For this feature film, Stiller asks us to accept Zoolander's limited antics for 80 minutes.
Not even spandex can survive that kind of stretch.
Derek Zoolander (Stiller) has been voted the top male model for three consecutive years but loses the honour to a new face named Hansel (Owen Wilson).
Dejected and confused, Zoolander vows to give up being incredibly beautiful and do something useful. First he returns to his roots in a coal mining town and begs to accompany his dad (Jon Voight doing an effective impersonation of Christopher Walken) into the mine.
It's a disaster and embarrasses poor dad even more than the sting of having a son prancing about on fashion runways.
Next Zoolander decides to star a school for 'children who don't read too good.' What the clueless Adonis doesn't know is that he is being groomed as an assassin.
It seems every major assassination in history has been committed by a male model or an model turned actor as was the case with John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln. Up to this point Zoolander seemed content with just being another mildly amusing but ultimately tedious vanity project like It's Pat, Stuart Saves His Family, Superstar, Night at the Roxbury or Ladies Man.
When Stiller decides to spoof the brainwashing techniques in The Manchurian Candidate and A Clockwork Orange, he thinks his film has gotten clever enough to be another Austin Powers. Yeah, and Claudia Schiffer is going to win an Oscar some day.
Actually Shiffer is just one of many celebrities who pop up as themselves in Zoolander. There's also David Bowie, Billy Zane, Tommy Hilfiger and *NSYNC's Lance Bass.
Not playing themselves are Stiller's wife Christine Taylor as a sexually frustrated investigative journalist, his dad Jerry Stiller as a corrupt fashion mogul and his mom Anne Meara as an angry protester.
The actors with cameos fare best because they're not around long enough to become annoying. The same is not true for Will Ferrell as a flamboyant designer and Milla Jovovich as the mistress of pain.
Stiller is a gifted comedian who invests a great deal of energy into his performance, but there's little he can do with a cardboard caricature.
Wilson is hysterical as a blond himbo. There are a handful of really inspired moments but not nearly enough of them to justify a feature film. It's the equivalent of asking a male model to compete in a marathon because he can strut down a fashion runway.
(More on: Zoolander).
(This film is rated AA)
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