![]() The entirety of the movie deals with his sneaking out of the orphanage, where he’s a cook charged with doling out black-bean gruel topped with stale nacho remnants, to wrestle with scrawny thief Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez). Or maybe a little Jack Black goes a long way.īlack, tenacious in tight pants of various shades, plays the titular Nacho, a kid raised in a Mexican orphanage who dreams only of becoming a luchador, with a superhero’s mask obscuring his round face in the wrestling ring. It takes slightly longer than that before its gears begin to slip and its jokes begin to wear and its laughs begin to fade it’s only 30 to 45 minutes too long, and therefore a marked improvement for a filmmaker who approached the medium with the attention deficiency of a TV sketch-comedy writer promising a premise that can’t withstand the elasticity of a feature. So it’s of some relief to announce that sitting through Nacho Libre, the latest from Hess (and co-writers Mike White and Jerusha Hess, Jared’s wife), isn’t an entirely unpleasant experience, which is to say it doesn’t feel as though it’s worn out its welcome before the second reel. Even the nine-minute short from which it sprang was some seven minutes too long, suggesting writer-director Jared Hess possesses a febrile mind unable to focus long enough on things like character or story - in other words, the basics of moviemaking. And every time someone tries to explain its appeal - the deadpan comedy that plays like Bergman drama, the geek love that smells like self-loathing, the catchphrases that drop like rat pellets - it just slips a little further from my grasp, though I might watch a movie entirely about Uncle Rico and his attempts to throw a football over them mountains. It’s to cinema what the Doors are to rock ‘n’ roll, a thing blindly and inexplicably championed as though it were a religion above being blasphemed by nonbelievers. There is no movie more overrated in recent history than Napoleon Dynamite. ![]()
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