Ben Stiller has hooked a rolling hitch to the tow rope du jour, the long-belated sequel, with predictable and sporadically funny results.
Stiller and Owen Wilson reunite in Zoolander 2 to rehash a fifteen year old running gag, joined by Will Ferrell as Mugatu and various new supporting characters and cameos (chareos?), a few of whom are a total hoot. For instance, Kristen Wiig’s tortured accent is verbal Bikram that would give Henry Higgins an aneurism and pleased me about as much (that is, a lot), while Kyle Mooney‘s Don Atari quietly spawns a mesmerizing new genre of millennial doublespeak. Sucks so bad, just awful. Loved it! Can’t believe how lame it was—totally awesome! And so on. As an oblique send up of today’s empty talk, clickbait headlines, and emoji-fueled netspeak, this is strong tea indeed.
Was it consciously done? Your lit-crit professor told me it doesn’t matter.
The actual plot is rubbish as anyone could have guessed, but that’s not a big deal. The real crime here is that Zoo 2 slips into lazy sequelitis, recycling the very same jokes and expecting the very same laughs as before. This is bad territory, the same poopy spittoon where we find floaters like Hot Tub Time Machine 2 and the Hangover sequels.
Another problem is that Zoolander and Hansel are still their same Y2K selves. Zoolander still doesn’t use a smartphone (?), and even the other characters can’t help pointing out that the duo is “old” and “lame”—which perhaps should be the filmmakers’ first clue that the leads are so out of touch as to be satirically impotent. Sure enough, the only decent zings here belong to the zeitgeisty supporting cast. Kind of a lot’s happened since 2001, and it would be nice to see Derek Zoolander reflect that in some character-appropriate way—a new print on his velvet jacket, or an iPhone, or something.
The 80/20 rule is in effect here, with a pretty small fraction of the action yielding an outsize slice of the comedic pie. Zoolander 2 doesn’t amaze but hardly disappoints—and if it does, well, you probably weren’t being like super fair with your expectations now were you? Tsk.
Oh, also, the continuation of the Derelicte joke (think reclaimed medical waste as the reductio ad absurdum of slow food hipsterism) is surprisingly apropos, at least from my Bay Area crow’s nest. (The flyovers may not get it, having presumably not yet been steeped in forty minute locovore French presses, flannel and suspenders and Talibeards and artisanal dog biscuits. Their loss?)
But forget all that. Everyone will like this movie. Why? Well, this was co-written by (and briefly features) Justin Theroux, which means Jennifer Aniston must at least like it, and as goes Aniston, so goes the writhing bulk of grocery-store America. My logic is sound. Anyway, I liked it, which is Everyone around these parts, so QED, and stop being such a boxtroll. (I’m not drunk, I’m high—37,000 feet, in fact.) OK, I’ll stop.
Haus Verdict: I enjoyed this! If you’re seeing Zoolander 2, you probably know what you’re getting into. And if you know what you’re getting into, this really shouldn’t surprise you too much. Squint for satire.