Ben Stiller pulls an Orson Welles - or, more accurately, a Woody Allen - as Derek Zoolander; aside from starring, he also directed, co-wrote, and co-produced the film. Zoolander is the world's top male model, a vacuous pretty boy (Who isn't all that good looking since it is, after all, Ben Stiller) who finds his world crashing down around him. His hated rival, Hansel (The hilarious Owen Wilson) is "hot" and wins Zoolander's award, Time Magazine has just named him a "model idiot" and, to top it all off, an international cartel of fashion designers are plotting to use him as a disposable assassin in a scheme to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia. He can't even win a model walk-off against Hansel, where the two show off their runway skills in a side-splitting splitscreen montage. I still can't shake the image of Wilson with his hand down his pants from my mind.

Stiller gets plenty of mileage out of dumb model jokes, and his performance is the ultimate innocuous idiot good guy. It's also nice to see the blonde female (Stiller's wife Christine Taylor) break stereotype and far outhink her male counterparts. In his weirdest role (and that's saying something), Will Ferrell is hilarious as the fiendish Mugatu. "Obey my dog!" he cries and even I felt helpless to resist its hypnotic barking. Still, the plot starts to fall apart at the end, with a clunky and unexciting finale.