More a facial expression than a movie. The expression is called Blue Steel (but of course there already was a movie called that), the trademark crinkled-brow and puckered-lip look of the "three-time male model of the year," Derek Zoolander. (He's working on a new look called Magnum, but it isn't yet ready for public display.) The feeling persists that the director and star, Ben Stiller, has more to offer than most Saturday Night Live alumni, although that feeling finds little support here. The search for laughs among pop songs, cinematic allusions, and celebrity cameos is chintzy and lazy; the re-emergence of the pup-tent boner from Flirting with Disaster is positively impoverished; Will Ferrell is, as always, an albatross; and the blowing-up of a TV sketch character into a feature-length protagonist could not be triter. Still worse, the political-assassination plot (if not the underlying motive to preserve and protect the Malaysian sweatshops) takes us far afield from the fashion world. The professional rivalry between the pushing-thirty hero and a young gun called Hansel (Owen Wilson) seems more fruitful, but there's no evidence the crop could feed an entire movie. Christine Taylor, Milla Jovovich, Jerry Stiller, Jon Voight. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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