VH1 made a movie? Ben Stiller as a fashion model? Will Ferrell as one of the "beautiful people?" David Duchvony in a fat suit?
Zoolander is a cheerfully absurd movie that manages to be both brainless and smart at the same time - if that makes any sense. Yes, the plot is just a clothesline to string up parodies of pop culture, but what a clothesline it is. The fashion industry, as David Duchvony helpfully explains to the title character Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller), has been behind every major political assassination for the last two hundred years. They brainwash male fashion models to do the job, because male fashion models do whatever they are told.
"Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't a model." Zoolander says.
"But those two guys on the grassy knoll were looking pretty sharp!" snarls Duchvony.
Ben Stiller has always been kind of a blah actor, but this time he's hit upon a character that really works: "There has to be more to life than being really, really, really attractive!" he pouts at the beginning, after losing the modeling contest of the year to Hansel (Owen Wilson).
Stiller's performance consists mainly of facial expressions, but they're amusing facial expressions, and he and Wilson (the fast-talking cowboy from Shanghai Noon) make a great comic team. The film is wall-to-wall with hilarious celebrity cameos, which range from just a few seconds to entire sequences.
After Zoolander loses his spark, he attempts to figure out the meaning of life... only to lose all of his friends in a gasoline fight (don't ask) and be rejected by his coal mining family. This makes him a prime target for Mugatu (the eternally weird Will Ferrell), who needs someone to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia because...
Never mind. The plot isn't the point. The first priority of a comedy is to make you laugh, and Zoolander is fast-paced, mindless, and amusing entertainment that will take you away for 90 minutes. It's not exactly a comedy for the ages, but it is well made and funnier (and more light-hearted) then both Scary Movies. It contains the line; "They're break-dancing fighting!" which I don't think has ever been said in film history.
About an hour into the screening, the alarms at the theater started going off. "There has been an emergency," the pre-recorded voice says. We all look at each other in confusion. What's happened? What do we do? How will we get home? The voice speaks again: "Please wait for instructions," and everyone gets up at once and starts to leave. The crowd was about halfway out of the building before an usher ran in and said, "False Alarm, False Alarm!" Then we all sat down, and the laughter was noticeably lower for the last 30 minutes, as everyone was pretty shaken up by the scare.
But the point is, for that first hour, the movie had so completely wrapped us up in its silly-happy world of fashion assassins that we had almost forgotten about everything. That's a real comedy. Movie Review, Zoolander, starring Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, 3 stars
