Filling the hole usually occupied by crappy Saturday Night Live skits-turned-feature films, Ben Stiller's Zoolander is a comedy cut from the same cloth as Airplane and The Naked Gun.  Like those pictures, it throws a lot of jokes at the audience, but most of them stick, which makes it better than all of the recent SNL debacles.  Zoolander, like Superstar and Ladies' Man, was born in sketch comedy, expanding a character created by Stiller for the 1996 and 1997 VH-1 Fashion Awards.

Stiller plays three-time Male Model of the Year Derek Zoolander, a brain-dead pretty boy we meet as he's being interviewed for Time by a reporter named Matilda Jeffries (Christine Taylor, Marcia from the Brady film updates) just before the VH-1 Fashion Awards (the cable channel produced the film).  Matilda, intent on writing a scathing piece on the modeling industry, gets plenty of good stuff, topped off by Derek showing her his catalogue of different "looks" that all look the same.

Derek is up for an unprecedented fourth straight MMOY Award but loses to red-hot newcomer Hansel (Owen Wilson, Stiller's Meet the Parents co-star), who tools around with a yo-yo, a scooter and an entourage that seems to grow in each scene.  Crushed, Derek considers retiring, but he is talked into one last campaign by agent Maury Ballstein (Jerry Stiller).  The big Derelicte show, it turns out, is really a ruse by an international syndicate of fashion designers who want to assassinate the Prime Minister of Malaysia because he's threatening to enact laws that will do away with the cheap child labor the designers need to make their dumb clothes.  Derek is hypnotized by a Bond-like baddie (Will Ferrell, SNL) named Jacobim Mugatu, who has a foxy Russian henchwoman (Milla Jovovich, The Claim) available to do his bidding.

Most of Zoolander's laughs come at the expense of male models, but the film's biggest gag might be its attempt to push Stiller (who's practically a chimp) and Wilson (who has the worst nose in Hollywood) as the cream of the world's modeling crop.  But Zoolander is far from a one-joke flick.  There are plenty of very funny set pieces (including Derek's return to his coal-mining roots) and a ton of nods to other films (most notably and hysterically, 2001: A Space Odyssey).  Stiller also casts half of the industry as both themselves and fictional characters (including a nearly unrecognizable Andy Dick), as well as most of his family.

Wilson, once again, steals the show in the acting department (he's been believable as a cowboy, a serial killer, and now, a rock-star-like model). As far as Stiller's direction (which I've thought has been overrated ever since Reality Bites), he's far from being what even the dimmest person could consider accomplished, but he gets the job done by keeping the film's pace quick and steady.  Stiller co-wrote Zoolander's script with Drake Sather, who has worked on some of television's funniest shows (NewsRadio, The Larry Sanders Show).  And Zoolander is yet another film that previously featured shots of the World Trade Center, which have been removed from the prints that will make their way to theatres near you.

1:30 –

for sexual content and drug references