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Real life wife Christine Taylor appears as Matilda Jeffries, who is just like every girl you know. She's an incredibly smart, incredibly beautiful, incredibly successful professional woman who's only dated one guy ever before. Obviously, this is because the only reason she exists is for someone to someday win her like a raffle prize (women have come so far in film). She's also some kind of fashion reporter for Time Magazine, a publication well known for its hard hitting pursuit of the modeling industry’s dark underbelly. Luckily for Derek she's also the smartest character in the movie, and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that their relationship ends up being kind of important, not to mention a little awkward and boring (how you can have so little chemistry with your own wife is beyond me). So now that I've said all this, the following sentence should now make perfect sense to you:

Zoolander is exactly as good as that sounds. This is another turn of the century, mid-tier comedy that's probably become more famous for who's in it than for how good it truly is.

That's not to say it isn't funny at all - most of the characters are, at times, borderline hilarious. There are a lot of obvious, light hearted jabs at the fashion industry but they're softballs, and the number of celebrities who agreed to cameo for this movie probably informs the generally inoffensive tone. The slightly abstract plot is offset by mostly decent performances, but too many of the jokes fall flat, and in the way that jokes do when they're translated from Japanese. They sound like it might once been funny in their native context, if only you knew what the hell that was. So you just laugh anyway, and quietly wish Ken Watanabe was with you so you’d know if you got it right.

Despite all this, I have to say that if Zoolander had simply finished as well as it started, it might have a distinguished place in my personal collection today. But that ending - dear God, that ending. Obviously I can't get into it, but I'm having a hard time deciding how to explain this. Oh, I know. Imagine a slightly above average ensemble comedy with a slightly above average script, and a slightly above average cast putting in slightly above average performances. And then, imagine it going with the ending that's only three nose hairs less stupid than when Fred pulls a rubber mask off someone and starts lisping about how it was old man Smithers all along.

After such a solidly, slightly above average first 90 minutes, I'd have been perfectly satisfied with an equally slightly above average ending. But instead you might want to just avoid the last few scenes, and fill in the blanks yourself.

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