MOVIE REVIEW: ZOOLANDER (2001)

As an elder millennial, your first viewing of this film was considered by some to be an essential rite of passage. Time has reduced it to the guilty pleasure that it’s always been, but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny. Parts of it are worth revisiting, but you need to be able to turn your brain off for a full 90 minutes in order to let this one work its magic on you.

Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) is a dimwitted male fashion model whose signature look is growing stale. As a younger male model (Owen Wilson) garners acclaim and several of Derek’s friends die in a freak gasoline station accident set to Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” our protagonist finds himself searching for meaning and purpose in the otherwise intellectually shallow world of fashion. Enter fashion house mogul Jacobim Mugatu (Will Ferrell), who recruits Derek to be brainwashed in order to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia at an upcoming fashion show because of his support for policies to end child labor in countries like his whose sweatshops support the fashion industry. A determined reporter (Christine Taylor) may hold the key to sparring Derek from being used as a pawn, but it’s a race against time.

Zoolander tries to be two things at once. First, it seeks to mock the fashion industry for some very surface level qualities. Second, it attempts to mock the industry further by promoting the preposterous notion that there is a seedy underbelly to the industry tied to extraordinary criminal activity on a global scale. The former runs out of steam pretty quickly, as there are only so many gags to be had for skewering the fashion industry at the level of its models. The latter is almost unnecessary in its complexity.

Despite the messiness of the plot, the all-in performances by the cast hold this thing together when it should probably fly apart in grand fashion. Stiller is pretty funny as Derek, and I sense restraint on Stiller’s part as the director and co-writer. This movie would have been dull if Derek and his empty-headedness was always front and center, but other characters are allowed to come forward to either set up humor for Derek or even lead the humor for a stretch in their own right. Owen Wilson makes for a pretty believable next-gen dimwit model while being his own unique character as well. Taylor works as the straight woman in this comedy routine. In some ways, she makes the film appreciable as a gender-flipped mystery tale, where she is the only competent person asking questions while the men fly off the handle and reach wrong conclusions.

At the end of the day, Zoolander is a bit too much. Maybe some of the scenes could have been broken down into smaller skits about the modeling world in general for better effect. It’s difficult to sustain interest and entertainment with such an over-the-top premise, because either the gag gets tired or the filmmakers can’t sustain the pace and flow of their zany characters. I think it’s the former here. There are some random things that don’t make sense, but the plot never really lags; the characters just lose their luster by the final reel.

Nostalgia makes people my age think that movies like this that we enjoyed as less-mature teens and early twentysomethings are better than they really are, just like Gen-Xers before us overestimate the quality of many 80s movies. Did I enjoy watching Zoolander again for the first time in ages? Sure. There are plenty of gags that still work. But for every gag that still works, there is at least one piece of the puzzle that either hasn’t aged well or makes less sense or was never funny in the first place because we hadn’t lived enough to be better evaluators of quality. It’s a harmless guilty pleasure, and you could watch a lot worse, but there are better movies to watch for nostalgia’s sake.

FINAL RATING: 2.75 out of 5