I remember a time when Ben Stiller was an ambitious actor. He was part of a wonderful ensemble cast in Neil Labute's Your Friends and Neighbors. He played a heroin addict in Permanent Midnight, which while not a great film, was definitely a serious acting role for Stiller. And with Jake Kasdan's Zero Effect, Stiller gets the task of setting up the entire film for us. His monologue exposition of Darryl Zero (Bull Pullman) establishes the tongue-in-cheek tone of the film perfectly. It is sad when an actor who has the ability to pull off a mission as arduous as this has relegated himself to acting in stupid comedies like Dodgeball with the same stupid character over and over again. Stiller has skill. Why he chooses not to use it is beyond my comprehension.

And where is Jake Kasdan? After Zero Effect, which was one of the best films of the nineties, he made the less than stellar Orange County, and hasn't (to my knowledge) done anything since. For such a young director to direct such a good picture, shows infinite promise. I want to see more from him.

So on its base level, Zero Effect is kind of a satire of mystery movies. The title character, Darryl Zero, is socially inept, and secluded from the public to the max, but it allows him to be unparagoned when it comes to his private detective work. In his solitude, he is an absolute slob, and aspires to be a musical artist, even though he obviously has no talent for it. When he is playing the private investigator, he is any character he chooses to be, but with a common trait of profound professionalism. Like Superman and Clark Kent, they are such polar opposites that one would never expect them to be one and the same.

On a deeper level, Zero Effect is a character study. Detective Zero is a unique person in the history of film, and he learns how to connect with people, or perhaps be himself (perhaps both) during the course of the film. I always appreciate movies like this, first because there aren't many, and second because there are even fewer that are done well.

Even fewer still, are movies that accomplish this feat, and entertain the audience as well. Zero Effect has an involving mystery, a good sense of humor, and achieves something on a deeper, more personal level than most films. It's funny how less ambitious films like Confidence and Criminal fail to succeed in even the modest ways in which they are concerned. Zero Effect should be enjoyed by the same people that liked Confidence, and may make them realize a little something about themselves as well. I loved it.