Plot
Daryl Zero (Bill Pullman), is the world's greatest detective, but is also a socially maladroit misanthrope. Among his quirks is that he never meets or has direct contact with his clients, instead conducting business through his assistant, lawyer Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller). He also subsists on cans of tuna fish. Through the movie, Zero provides narration as he reads lines from his proposed autobiography.
Zero and Arlo are hired by Portland area millionaire Gregory Stark (Ryan O'Neal). Stark has lost the key to a safety deposit box and is being blackmailed by an unknown person who forces him to go through elaborate instructions to reach a drop off point. Zero quickly discovers that the blackmailer is Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens) an EMT with a mysterious past. Zero refuses to turn over Gloria's identity to Stark until he understands why she is blackmailing him. Making contact with Gloria, Zero discovers that he is attracted to her, compromising his trademark objectivity.
Meanwhile Stark pressures Arlo to reveal the blackmailer's identity so that he can have that person killed. Arlo must also deal with Zero's quirky and unusual demands on his time, demands that increasingly conflict with Arlo's desire for a relationship with his girlfriend Jess.
Zero eventually discovers that Stark had been obsessed with Gloria's mother when the two were in college. She threatened to reveal that Stark had raped her and so he had her killed. However, she had already given birth to their daughter Gloria, who was discovered and raised by the hitman after the murder. At a final meeting to deliver a ransom payment, Stark collapses from a heart attack and is saved by Gloria. She then flees the country.
Read more about this topic: Zero Effect
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“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)