While watching Zoolander, the new comedy starring, directed and co-written by Ben Stiller, it's important--crucial, even--to keep in mind how much worse it could have been. One needs only look back to such recent disasters borne of short TV comedy sketches such as Superstar and A Night at the Roxbury to gain a new and slightly deeper appreciation for this silly and often ridiculous movie.
Zoolander--which clocks in at just over 90 minutes yet feels considerably longer--is based on a comedy sketch from 1996's VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards, in which Stiller appeared as the hugely popular yet painfully dim- witted male supermodel Derek Zoolander. Here, with Owen Wilson as his modeling rival, a New Age-y surfing bum named Hansel, and Stiller's wife Christine Taylor as an investigative journalist along for the ride, Stiller reprises the role. Careful not to become solely for fashion insiders, like Robert Altman's Prˆt-…- Porter, Zoolander instead throws in an inane and absurd plot involving brainwashing and an assassination attempt on the ruler of Malaysia.
What ultimately saves Zoolander is Stiller's direction, which keeps the film moving rapidly through an enormous number of scenes and supporting characters, as well as plenty of cameos, from such oddly-related celebrities as David Bowie, David Duchovny, Li'l Kim, Winona Ryder and Jon Voight, which add a certain amount of brevity to the already light-weight proceedings.
In the end, Zoolander certainly delivers enough laughs and chuckles to warrant a matinee ticket price and appeal to a large, ageless audience, perhaps exactly what is needed in this time of national insecurity and fear. But, unfortunately, its substitution of farcical humor for intelligent satire limits the movie's success.
