10 Ways Zoolander 2 Is Everything That’s Wrong With Hollywood
9. It Mines Minorities For Laughs
Rather than come up with clever one-liners or hilarious sight gags or any other form of real joke, Zoolander 2 adopts the comedic technique of a playground bully: taking the p*ss out of everything thats different to the norm. Unlike the original, which had some genuinely brilliant writing, this sequel is more than content to mine minorities for laughs. Benedict Cumberbatchs character All the greatest offender, serving merely as an opportunity for the script to poke fun at transgender/transsexual people. All is asked whether he/she has a hotdog or a bun, and later suffers the indignity of Owen Wilsons Hansel having a look to find out. How is that okay? Throughout the film, theres also a running joke about Hansel being in a non-monogamous relationship with an orgys worth of men, women and animals. Isnt that hilarious? No, not really. Minus the animal bit, a lot of people actually live like that these days. This is just another example of Zoolander 2 pointing out something un-traditional and ridiculing it, which comes across as mean-spirited. There was a time when making racist jokes in movies was considered acceptable in Hollywood. Thats not widely accepted anymore, which puts Zoolander 2 in the same trying-to-be-funny-but-actually-being-offensive camp as Adam Sandler's The Ridiculous Six.
