2016, Movies

Zoolander 2 (2016, Ben Stiller)

I had heard bad things about this film, but seeing is truly believing. It is awfully hard to make a movie this bad with so many talented people in it. They give awards for it

It’s hard to know exactly what went wrong but a guess is that the idea for a sequel – and getting all the celebrity cameos – was way more important than coming up with a story for the sequel. (The story doesn’t really get going until well, well into the movie, which suggests, again, that the story was not really part of the initial concept.)

Aside from the fact that there’s barely any plot to this sequel, here are some of the things wrong with the film:

  • Most of the celebrity cameos are supposed to be jokes in and of themselves, as if the appearance of the celebrity is the thing that is funny.
  • Many of the jokes are “weird sex is funny” jokes and not really much more than that. That was something that often worked prior to the internet. I’m not sure it does now that everyone knows everyone has kinks.
  • The opening 20 or so minutes is crushingly dull and unfunny – a Love Guru-esque level of unfunny in terms of dull, lifeless scenes made by talented people – that it put a sour taste in my mouth. When the jokes started to land later on in the film I was so angry with the opening third or so of the movie that I didn’t want to laugh. I suspect that, had the first third been better, I wouldn’t have hated this movie so much.
  • However, I laughed a couple of times total in 100 minutes or more, which says basically all you need to know.

Had I been live blogging or tweeting this, I would have had more to say.

3/10 is charitable but I feel like maybe a few of the jokes I didn’t laugh at near the end of the film were actually funny, I was just so damn annoyed already.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.