Aka Zoolander 1.5.
By Lucy O’Brien
Delivering a sequel to a movie that felt like bottled lightning was always going to be a tough ask. The original Zoolander’s gags were hit and miss, but worked overall thanks to a fresh concept – male models are really, really stupid – and an inspired performance from Ben Stiller as the eponymous pouty idiot.
Without a new shtick to give it wings, the sequel feels less inspired. Zoolander 2 takes the jokes from the original and recycles them with a few minor tweaks, and the resulting film, while still very funny in fits and starts, never quite hits the high notes of its predecessor.
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That lightning has left the bottle, then, but there’s still fun to be had with Derek Zoolander 15 years on, as he returns to the modelling world in order to reconnect with his estranged son.Stiller – who looks alarmingly the same in the role – has lost none of his dumb charm; in fact, his cluelessness (“you’re self-centred” “”…but that’s not how I think of me!”) may have grown more appealing with age.
He’s once again well matched with Zoolander alum – and equally ageless – Owen Wilson, returning here as the dopey Hansel. Their dynamic can be summed up nicely with the quip “I miss not knowing things with you”, and a brilliantly convoluted sequence where Hansel tries to get Derek to reproduce his gravity-bending ‘blue steel’ look by throwing objects at his face.
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That the pair are older and have lost touch with the current cultural lexicon makes for the biggest laughs in Zoolander 2. Their cluelessness is driven home with particular bite by Kyle Mooney’s obnoxious millennial, whose opinions bleed with hip and highly confusing contradiction (“this tattoo is totally sh*t, don’t you love it?”).
Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘All’ is also part of this running gag, and although his non-binary gender is handled a little clumsily – Derek and Hansel ask him about his genitals – the joke’s ultimately on them as All proves to be the current ‘it’ model on the runway – a strange new world for Derek and Hansel indeed.
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Zoolander 2’s biggest gift to audiences, however, is Kristen Wiig’s Alexanya Atoz, a grotesque fashion titan of indeterminable Eastern European origin whose unique accent and botoxed-restricted facial expressions steal every second she’s on screen. It’s just a shame that once Will Ferrell’s Mugatu returns, Alexanya is relegated to the background.
Still, Ferrell is as fun as he ever was, even if he’s playing to exactly the same beats of the original (his scheme is slightly less political this time around, but no less hairbrained). It’s testament to Ferrell’s profound silliness that he still delivers on laughs while working with such thin material.
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And really, over familiarity is the major problem with Zoolander 2. Newcomers Penelope Cruz, Cyrus Arnold and an over-abundance of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them celebrities do their best to inject some fresh blood into old proceedings, but ultimately we’ve been here and done that. Throwbacks to gags from the original only serve to hammer home how little has actually changed for these characters in their 15 year absence: Hansel’s hot right now, we get it. What else you got?
While Zoolander 2 is a perfectly adequate piece of comic escapism, a lack of fresh ideas makes it ultimately toothless. Worth the ticket price, perhaps, for what happens to Justin Bieber in the film’s first ten minutes; a sequence that will delight and appall audiences in equal measure.
