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dir: Jared Hess
I know, you're asking yourself, "How could this not be funny? It's got Jack Black! With a moustache and tights!"
No-one probably found the bizarre success of Napoleon Dynamite more surprising than the guy who made it. Jared Hess made a strange little film clearly set in the 80s, but updated with a bundle of modernisms to make it contemporary, and watched it become a cultish hit.

Seeing as Hess and his wife / writing partner are Mormons, if you ever wondered what a flick made by observant Mormons would look like, look no further than Napoleon Dynamite and this here current monstrosity stinking up our cinemas.

Now that I’ve used the word ‘Mormon’, I can’t get a scene from The Simpsons out of my head, where a lawyer at a Senate hearing yells at Homer ‘You, sir, are a moron,’ to which Homer, of course replies, ‘Mormon? But I’m from Earth!’

If you’re not looking for it, it could strike you as strange that Napoleon Dynamite, his first flick, contains no swearing, violence, sex or nudity, despite being set in a milieu that would seem to demand each and every one of those elements (the contemporary American high school genre).

Some almighty power, probably money, has induced Hess to relax his straitlacedness for his second flick, but it essentially ploughs the same furrow as the first: complete dependence on an unusual main character to carry everything, over-reliance on quirk and weirdness for its own sake, a story devoid of any sleaziness or sense, a semi-retarded sidekick and some kind of arbitrary conflict for resolution by flick’s end. There is a love interest, of sorts, but there’s nary a naughty scene or thought from beginning to end.

And what a love interest. Sister Encarnacion (Ana de la Reguera) is represented as being a nun of such purity and virtue that I am certain, had there been a nude scene in the flick, a pure white light would have shone from her holy vagina, bright enough to blind all of the wicked people in the world and light up the darkest night sky. But of course there’s no way such a thing would happen here.

What Jack Black does, as the main character Ignacio, is the kind of stuff Jim Carrey has been doing to stink up films that lack a strong enough sense of a story independent of the identity of the main actor. He’s not playing a character, he’s just Jack Black with a funny accent. And that’s not funny ha ha, it’s funny as in Not Quite Right. Whether that’s what Black is really like, or whether that’s just the persona he likes performing as, it is mostly painful, occasionally amusing, but embarrassing at other times.

And I say this as someone who likes Jack Black. Occasionally.

He doesn’t even do the accent very well. It drops in and out more than a mobile phone call during a car crash caused by a lightning strike.

But it’s not like it matters. The mere fact that it is Jack Black is supposed to be the clincher, the reason why Ignacio’s antics are amusing. And, most often, they’re not.

That’s not to say that the entire film is painful to watch, it’s just that it’s really neither funny nor that entertaining. It’s pretty dumb and pretty dull. And, apart from the nun, not that pretty.

Ignacio is a friar in a Mexican monastery. The other monks treat him with contempt, and he generally does the most menial tasks available, including the cooking. He dreams of donning the costume of a luchador (wrestler), so he can achieve the glory and fame he believes is his birthright. All this despite the fact that he can’t wrestle for shit and loses every match.

He meets and teams up with a wrestler as bad as himself called Esquelito (Hector Jimenez), which means ‘The Skeleton’, who suggests mystical solutions to their crapness, which surprisingly, never pan out. It’s hard to work out who is worse, but at the very least Esquelito serves the same function here that Pedro did in Napoleon Dynamite. Which, you know, is vital. Films are way funnier when there’s a Mexican sidekick.

Somehow, Ignacio becomes a folk hero as his alternate identity Nacho Libre, which is Mexican for ‘Crap Over-actor’, and all the little kids want to be like him. He wants to impress the nun, for whom his chubby loins burn, but she is on the shiny path of sanctity, and abjures him from following the path to glory and selfishness as a luchador.

There are crazy schemes, zany set pieces, and strange peripheral characters doing strange things. Very little of any of this works. Most of it looks like amateurish sketches extended out to produce one of those D grade flicks made by comedians who used to be on Saturday Night Live. And that’s not good.

Black seems to enjoy angling for humour that arises from his own expense, as in scenes emphasising his chubbiness, or how foolish he looks in whatever costume the scene requires him to wear. That’s nice, that really is but it’s not that funny for 90 or so minutes. It hardly justifies the expense of going and seeing a film when the main attraction is that the lead guy gets to pooch his gut out whilst wearing a leotard.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s a whole cult of women who like that sort of thing. Which would be wonderful, because chubby guys need loving too. I just don’t think we necessarily have to have films made about us just because we’re rotund, stout or plump and look funny dressed up in tight clothing.

And if that’s the funniest idea the film has going for it, along with the fact that the main character is a wrestler who can’t wrestle, or more Mexicanly, a luchador who can’t luch, then there’s fuck all here for all of you. Maybe I’m wrong and the appeal went over my head, but I just don’t see that any of this was even mildly diverting.

Jared Hess and his wife Jerusha clearly had nothing else left to say after Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon Dynamite didn’t have that much to say either, apart from the fact that oddballs are people too, but at least it was the first time they said it. They’ve made another version of their first film, and, frankly, I’ve heard it all before.

4 fart jokes put in during post-production by studio executives who said to each other “we know this scene is funny, it’s great, but if we just put in a fart noise here, even though it doesn’t make any sense, it’ll be WAY funnier” out of 10

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“I hate all the orphans in the world!” – Esquelito, Nacho Libre.