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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 14.84%
Worth A Look: 23.44%
Average: 10.94%
Pretty Bad: 21.88%
Total Crap: 28.91%
11 reviews, 62 user ratings
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| Nacho Libre |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Another deadpan wish-fulfillment comedy from Jared Hess."
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Question: Why would smart guys like Jack Black, director Jared Hess ('Napoleon Dynamite'), and screenwriter Mike White ('Chuck & Buck,' 'School of Rock') make a dumb wrestling comedy? Answer: Because they wanted to, and because 'Nacho Libre' isn't as dumb as it seems.Less concerned with slapstick than with the sort of bizarre deadpan laughs that were Hess's stock in trade in Napoleon Dynamite, the new film isn't nearly as quotable as anything else these three have been involved with. (Though the line about men sometimes wearing stretchy pants in their rooms for fun deserves a mention.) It's an odd duck -- the moments of physical humor you've seen in the ads are surrounded by dead air. Hess has the most languid sense of comic timing since Bill Murray at his peak.
Nacho Libre finds Black as Ignacio, or "Nacho," a friar at a remote Mexican monastery who cooks for the orphans but harbors dreams of being a great luchador. Nacho has the build for it, but not the skills. He gets a neighborhood thief named Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez), who's as bony as Nacho is fleshy, to train with him as his partner. Nacho's goal, aside from the glory of hearing thousands of fans yelling his name, is to raise money for the monastery and perhaps win the heart of the comely Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera), the orphans' new teacher.
Aside from Black and Peter Stormare in a truly weird cameo as some sort of guru who encourages Nacho to drink eagle yolk, most of the cast of Nacho Libre is Mexican. I've seen some rumbling, based on this film and the famous Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite, that Jared Hess is a racist, specifically against those of Latino extraction. Actually, the least ridiculous people in Napoleon Dynamite were non-white -- including Pedro (why else do you think everyone wore "Vote for Pedro" shirts for a while?) -- and nobody in Nacho Libre is ridiculed for being Mexican. The movie's basic plot could've unfolded anywhere, but Hess wanted to capture the colorful and specific tone of lucha libre, the heavy masked wrestlers sweating all over each other. Visually, it's an injection of sci-fi superheroics into an already vibrant culture. It made me want to find a copy of Wrestling Women Vs. the Aztec Mummy, a film that could emerge from no other land.
Jack Black is strongly American and modern (the latter is the main reason he didn't quite work for me in King Kong), and here he is in a village seemingly out of time, with a barely passable accent. Yet somehow the performance comes off; it fits the general play-acting vibe of the film. He's never quite Nacho; he's never not Jack Black. It's as if someone had said "Wouldn't it be cool if we took this lucha libre flick and stuck Jack Black into it?" and then actually did it. When Black gets his music mojo working -- once when improvising at a party, once when sharing a song he wrote about his beloved Encarnación -- it doesn't take you out of the movie as much as it would if there were more of a pretense that Black is actually supposed to be Nacho. In his two films so far, Jared Hess goes beyond irony into a sort of meta-comedy. I don't quite know what's going on under the surface and I don't think Hess knows either.
The pleasures of Nacho Libre are in the details -- Esqueleto's addiction to corn on the cob dusted with chili powder; the somberly funny way Nacho and Encarnación munch toast together; the use of Os Mutantes' gaily lurching "Bat Macumba" to underscore a bit with Nacho's robe on fire. Underneath it all is a kind of deadpan joy -- familiar to those who cackled at Napoleon Dynamite dancing to get votes for Pedro. Nacho Libre is a film that Napoleon, with his affection for ninjas and his drawings of ligers, would pay to see -- or maybe even make himself.Hess's movies are like the unassuming but ambitious doodles that kids like Napoleon or the young Nacho draw in their notebooks. I'll be curious to see what Hess doodles next.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14549&reviewer=416
originally posted: 01/11/07 12:08:09
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 CineVegas Film Festival For more in the 2006 CineVegas Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
16-Jun-2006 (PG)
DVD: 24-Oct-2006
UK
11-Aug-2006
Australia
14-Sep-2006
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