September 28, 2001 | According to the production notes for Zoolander, director, star and co-screenwriter Ben Stiller based his movie “on a 1996 VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards character he co-created with MTV Movie Awards writer/producer Drake Sather.” But don’t hold that against him. I mean, give the guy a little credit: At least he didn’t try to inflate a Saturday Night Live sketch to feature length.

Granted, Zoolander is almost as insubstantial as one of the lesser SNL spin-offs. But, then again, its transparent flimsiness is part of the joke. A light but sprightly spoof of celebrity, excess and self-absorbed silliness in the world of New York-based fashion trendies, this modestly amusing trifle is the cinematic equivalent of a discount store knock-off. If you know what you’re getting for your money, and your expectations are sufficiently low, you’ll likely be satisfied.

In the title role of Derek Zoolander, superstar male model and pop-culture icon, Stiller gets a surprising amount of mileage from what basically is a one-note caricature. With his sucked-in cheeks, spiky moussed hair and preening body language, Stiller is a walking sight gag from the get-go. And he enhances the overall impression of dim-bulb fatuousness each time he speaks, giving Zoolander a voice that suggests a mewing kitten on Quaaludes.

Just how clueless is this hunky dunce? During an atypical moment of selflessness, he yearns to establish the Zoolander School for Kids Who Don’t Read Good. But when he’s presented with a scale model of the proposed institution, Zoolander has a hissy fit, because... well, just look at it! Only ants could attend classes in a building that small! A real school would have to be at least.... at least... well, at least three times bigger! So there!

Zoolander is shaken from his secure position as the bright sun of his own private universe only when he fails to win his fourth straight Model of the Year award. The glittering prize goes instead to Hansel (Owen Wilson), a dashing newcomer who sounds every bit as straw-headed as our hero. (Hansel idolizes Sting, even though he’s never actually heard any of the pop star’s music: “I just admire him for recording it.”)

The following day, three fellow male models try to cheer Zoolander by taking him for a ride through Manhattan. But the outing turns into a misadventure when his three happy-go-lucky buddies stop to buy gas, then launch into a slo-mo water-splashing duel, just like in one of their TV commercials. Unfortunately, they splash gasoline, not water. Even more unfortunately, one of them tries to light a cigarette. The next scene finds Zoolander delivering a eulogy – which, of course, he mispronounces as “you-goo-ly.”

The tragedy forces Zoolander to re-evaluate his values and even consider another line of work. But he quickly discovers, and Zoolander gleefully underscores, that there aren’t many other employment options for someone whose most marketable talent is “being really, really good looking.” He returns to his hometown in southern New Jersey, hoping to work alongside his coal-miner father (Jon Voight, looking and sounding like he’s channeling Christopher Walken). But Dad wants no part of his namby-pamby offspring, especially when he sees his son wearing a fishtail in a TV commercial for bottled water. “You’re a mermaid!” the father rails. “A mer-man!” Zoolander insists, to little avail.

So far, so good. But as Zoolander the model returns to New York, Zoolander the movie glides into more familiar territory, and evolves into the kind of free-wheeling action-movie spoofiness that too often passes for witty originality in contemporary comedies.

There’s a plot, of sorts: Shadowy fashion-industry moguls seek a pliable pawn to assassinate the president of Malaysia, who wants to curtail child labor in clothing manufacturing, and the bad guys figure, rightly, that no one would be more pliable than a doofus like Zoolander. The evil plan calls for brainwashing – though, in Zoolander’s case, only a light braindusting is required – and the mind-shaping task falls to fashion designer Mugatu, broadly played by Saturday Night Live regular Will Farrell as a platinum-blond wacko whose hairstyle appears to be cribbed from a Wizard of Oz munchkin.

Much of Zoolander plays like Dumb and Dumber  meets The Manchurian Candidate, with the characters played by Stiller and Wilson setting aside their differences to battle the bad guys. The two actors are extremely funny in a scene where the rival models compete in a winner-take-all “walk-off” (judged by David Bowie, one of several luminaries who make fleeting appearances as themselves), and another scene where they match wits with an Apple computer and lose. It’s slightly more difficult to laugh, however, when an unbilled David Duchovny, riffing on his X-Files persona, pops up to explain that male models were brainwashed into killing, among others, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

Christine Taylor, Stiller’s real-life wife, figures into the mix as a Time magazine reporter who helps Hansel and Zoolander, and briefly enjoys a ménage a trois with the male models. Her character seems to exist primarily to emphasize that, hey, Hansel and Zoolander aren’t, you know, homosexuals. Indeed, Zoolander goes out of its way to avoid even the slightest hint that any male model on view anywhere in the film is anything but straight. If you’re gay, you may be hard-pressed to decide whether you should feel insulted or grateful.