A MODEL OF (MOSTLY) CLEVER SATIRE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

``Zoolander'' is a rare, modern stupid comedy: one that's smart about half the time.

Credit writer-director-star Ben Stiller with making sure that this movie about a brainless male supermodel displays a few brains. The overall shape of the movie is as contrived and programmatic as any Adam Sandler atrocity, but it includes enough satiric details and amusingly absurd riffs to keep thinking viewers chuckling.

Based on a character Stiller whipped up for some VH-1 fashion-show nonsense, Derek Zoolander is a pretty vacant type who - unaccountably, since he looks like Stiller, which is obviously a central joke - is the most successful model in New York. Until, that is, he loses a big posing award to extreme-sports-styled upstart Hansel (Owen Wilson). This drives Zoolander into a funk of self-assessment.

``I'm pretty sure there's more to life than just being really, really good-looking,'' he muses, ``and I plan on finding out what that is.''

While he struggles to plumb the depths of his shallowness, nefarious forces are out to commandeer what little there is of Zoolander's mind. The hot designer Mugatu (Will Ferrell, doing his usual antic thing under a bleached-blond poodle cut), who is really in charge of the fashion industry's secret assassination program, intends to brainwash Zoolander. He wants him to kill the new president of Malaysia, whose minimum livable wage policies threaten the whole rag trade's profitability. Easily tricked into a day spa that's really a hypnotism facility, our man is programmed to kill on coded command.

Zoolander's only hope of preventing tragedy - once he finally figures out what's going on - are two former enemies: the rival Hansel and Time magazine reporter Matilda (played by Stiller's wife, Christine Taylor), who by virtue of being smart is somewhat of a natural adversary. Stiller's dad, Jerry, also appears as Zoolander's untrustworthy, uncouth agent Maury Ballstein. And actual model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich hams it up as Mugatu's henchwoman Katinka, a kind of vinyl fetish Natasha Fatale. David Bowie, David Duchovny and assorted real-life models and designers do cameos.

There was some discussion about delaying ``Zoolander's'' release in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. It has murderous secret plots, one explosion (though that's the result of Zoolander's goofy model pals frolicking, fashion videolike, through a ``wet look'' tableau involving gasoline) and shots of the Manhattan skyline (World Trade Center-free). But the dark aspects of the story, which Stiller co-wrote with Drake Sather and John Hamburg, are comically exaggerated enough to be beside the point. Only the most hyper-sensitive are likely to be upset by them.

The real agenda here is to skewer the culture of empty celebrity (which arguably makes this movie the first meaningful release of a newly serious era). It goes without saying that Stiller has chosen the easiest of targets to lampoon, and certainly never veers far from the stereotype of models as idiots. Don't send these guys to retrieve files from a Mac; they'll have no idea how to turn the computer on, har-har.

Nevertheless, Stiller and company come up with a string of mercilessly funny parodies of everything from vacuous, behind-the-whatever star profiles to ironic/meaningless ad campaigns (``Moisture is the essence of wetness!'') to the out-of-hand competitiveness that had more and more been tightening its grip on American society.

None of which is to say that ``Zoolander'' has anything profound to say about what we may now be leaving behind. It's just a movie that realized from the start that, should the glamour culture wind up on history's scrap heap, only morons will view it as a loss.

``ZOOLANDER''

(Rated PG-13: violence, language, sex)

The stars: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Christine Taylor, Will Ferrell, Milla Jovovich, Jerry Stiller.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Ben Stiller. Written by Stiller, Drake Sather and John Hamburg. Produced by Stiller, Scott Rudin and Stuart Cornfeld. Released by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: One hour, 29 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars