'Zoolander' Falls A Few Laughs Short of Funny

Ben Stiller plays supermodel Derek Zoolander. (Paramount Pictures)

Maybe another rewrite, maybe an extra writer, maybe a better concept...

A swarm of “maybes” buzz around the brain while you’re watching “Zoolander.” What could have made it better? Normally, you’d just dismiss a comedy that doesn’t quite work, with a shrug of the shoulders.

But with a performer as likable and funny as Ben Stiller, you can’t help wanting to urge it along. Even though it’s mostly pleasant and sometimes funny, “Zoolander” could use some sort of boost.

Stiller, who also co-produced, co-wrote and directed the movie, stars as Derek Zoolander, a spiky-haired supermodel who’s at the top of his profession. But Derek is a stud with very little brain. You should hear him try to tackle the word “eulogy.” And when someone confesses her bulimia to him in a candid moment, he replies with breathy disbelief: “You can read minds?”

Derek has an immediate threat to his career: a tow-headed newcomer, Hansel (Owen Wilson), who is adorning magazine covers everywhere. When Derek loses out to Hansel for Supermodel of the Year, he decides it’s time to get real with himself. What he ought to do with his life, he decides, is help people who “can’t read good.”

Derek’s aimlessless makes him a perfect patsy, it turns out, for fluffy-haired clothes designer Mugatu (Will Ferrell), who hatches a “Manchurian Candidate”-style plan to kill a certain Malaysian leader who doesn’t appreciate the capitalistic benefits of unregulated child labor.

Also figuring in the story: Time magazine reporter Matilda (Christine Taylor), who becomes sweet on dumb old Derek after lambasting him in a news article; and Maury Ballstein (Jerry Stiller, Ben’s father), Derek’s seedy agent who’s inexplicably in league with Mugatu.

And, predictably, you can find the whole Stiller family in there, including Anne Meara (Ben’s mom) and Amy Stiller (his sister).

You have to like Derek, who’s based on a 1996 VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards character Stiller created with writer-producer Drake Sather. But he’s amusing only in fits and starts. In fact, the whole movie seems funnier in passing than during the business at hand.

Stiller and Wilson work up some laugh-inducing moments as too-cool-for-school rivals, but they never sustain the promising teamwork. There’s a great sendup of those handsome-models-having-fun sequences, in which Derek and his boy-model pals horse around in a gas station—with disastrous results. The movie also has some diverting celebrity walk-ons from Billy Zane, David Bowie and others.

But the main story, which includes a predictable attraction between Derek and reporter Matilda, is pretty humdrum. And “Zoolander” smacks a little too closely of Mike Myers’s “Austin Powers” movies, especially with the plot involving international intrigue. Derek’s signature “look,” a hilarious attempt to contort his facial features into a sexily cool expression, suggests similar muggy poses by Myers’s Austin. C’mon, Ben. You’re funny in your own right. Do your thing, and more of it.