Zoo-pid sequel for Stiller
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT: Star misses mark with another chapter of Derek Zoolander
Zoolander No. 2 is a James Bond flick with a frontal lobotomy, a braindamaging procedure that renders Ben Stiller’s oddball movie into an incoherent and idiotic mess.
This sad state of inertia is just like Stiller’s onscreen character, Derek Zoolander, who is a total moron. A decade after a tragedy killed his wife (Christine Taylor, now a ghost) and years after his son Derek Jr. (Cyrus Arnold) has been taken away over bad parenting issues, Derek is a selfstyled “hermit crab” who has retired from modelling. He has also lost the fire of his burning “looks.”
But a dastardly plot to kill all the world’s rock stars suddenly gets him back in the game. Unfortunately, the game is lame. Here are five wacky ways that Zoo 2 fails us all:
1. This sequel, coming 15 years after the funny first one, is another satire on America’s obsession with good looks and shallow celebrity. Been there, done that; it is all so obvious and the public does not seem to give a damn in a world in which Donald Trump could become U.S. president. So the laughs are sporadic.
2. No. 2 is a vanity project for Stiller, who serves as co-producer, co-writer, director and co-star. Owen Wilson returns as his friend/rival Hansel, Will Ferrell reprises the villainous role of Mugatu and Penelope Cruz is smoking hot as an Interpol agent. With the exception of Cruz, who turns red leather into a lather, the star power is zero. The other three leads are just giving us the same old Zoo-pid story with a couple of new twists stolen from the 007 canon, The Matrix trilogy and The Da Vinci Code series.
3. Like the original, the new movie is bursting with celebrity cameos from Justin Bieber to Benedict Cumberbatch, Sting and the power duo of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. It is also jammed up with support performances from Stiller’s pals, among them Justin Theroux, Kiefer Sutherland and Billy Zane. This gimmick, like the recycled plot, is tired. Except for the 007-style opening scene, with Bieber on the run from would-be assassins through the back alleys of Rome. This sequence is hilarious, not least because Bieber is in on the joke of having him killed by haters. Sting is also amusing in his hooded hero cameo.
4. I know that, in the original, the orgy scene involving Stiller, Wilson and Taylor fell within the movie’s zeitgeist. But the orgy sex and mass pregnancy joke that is M.C. hammered into our brains in Zoo-2 gets so repetitive that it just becomes tedious. Beyond that, the hints about man-beast orgies involving goats, chickens and a Pygmy hippo are just not in any way acceptable in a Hollywood comedy.
5. Doing a Zoolander sequel is a waste of time for Stiller as he rolls into his 50s. While he works only occasionally as a director, the comedy actor followed the original Zoolander (2001) with a satirical masterwork, Tropic Thunder (2008). Then he hand-crafted a charming (if underappreciated) romantic remake, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013).Returning to the now-barren Zoolander universe is ass-backwards for his filmmaking career.