THIS farrago of stupidity, noise, bad taste and dramatic ineptitude is the brainchild of writer/director/principal actor Ben Stiller who, in 2001, teamed with Owen Wilson to make the original “Zoolander” something of a cult movie.

Or so I understand. I never saw it. Was that wise? Or merely unfortunate? The omission wasn’t deliberate. In those days, I was writing for another publication whose arts editor told me what to cover.

It certainly deprived me of the back story, in which Zoolander (Stiller) apparently murdered his wife and got away with it. Since then he’s been searching for his son, now in his teens. His one-time colleague Hansel (Wilson) has received an invitation for the pair to resume their earlier careers as fashion models.

Real-estate mogul Mugatu (Will Ferrell) is up to no good in the fashion season. The head of Interpol’s Fashion Division (Penelope Cruz) wants Zoolander and Hansel to solve that problem. That’s the core of a very floppy plot.

Zoolander was never the child of a graphic novel. But this is a sequel. And a sequel seldom equals its predecessor. Certainly Stiller and Wilson don’t have the acting chops or other kind of creative clout to sustain this one. A gaggle of supporting cameos from guests with nothing to lose but their reputation for judging acceptance of roles wisely does nothing to fill the void. Identifying them creates this sequel’s few challenges. The rest is over-ripe, under-cooked balderdash of no perceptible merit.

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