Posted: 06/19/2006

Nacho Libre

(2006)

by Michael Jones

Like most children of the early 90’s, I loved Mad-Libs. Next to playing Contra, creating stories through filling blank spaces with nouns like “booger” and adjectives like “poopy” was always a welcome part to my daily routine. However, like most well-adjusted youths, I lost interested sometime around puberty, when “boob” ceased becoming merely a funny word and instead a lifelong (and often Quixotic) pursuit which has consumed my teenage years onto adulthood. I haven’t thought about Mad-Libs until I was watching Nacho Libre. It dawned upon me that this juvenile literary exercise was the only reasonable explanation to both the plot and the dialogue of this film.

Director Jared Hess, his wife Jeshua and co-writer Mike White must have stumbled upon a movie Mad-Lib which read : A/n (ethnicity) (occupation) who always dreamed of being a/n (different occupation) does so to (verb) the (noun) and win the (noun) of his dreams. They decided the winning combination were the respective words, “Mexican”, “friar”, “wrestler” “save”, “orphanage” and “woman”. They sent a treatment to Jack Black and Voila!—a film is born. This notion is strengthened by an early scene where Ignacio (Black) tries to ask the chaste Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera) to his quarters for some (noun). Is it “drinks”? “sex”? Nope. Hess and co. filled in the blank with “toast.” Thus, we have our “toast scene.”

To be perfectly fair, there are other random acts of movie which loosely occur throughout Nacho Libre. There are a few fights, including one with more disturbing midgets than a Leprechaun marathon. There’s Ignacio/Nacho’s partner, a scrappy and crappy emaciate simply known as Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez). There’s also another masked wrestler which vaguely counts as the villain in the film, the oily Ramses (Cesar Gonzalez). Aside from that, the characters do little except eat corn-on-a-stick, fart and smear feces on each other (No, I’m not making that up).

Hess is known for Napoleon Dynamite, the 2004 cult film which convinced a disturbingly large amount of people that 80 minutes of socially-retarded mouth-breathing is both comedic and bankable. Although he’s been lauded for having a unique style and outlook on comedy, Hess has stolen most of what makes him “unique” from better writer/directors. Wes Anderson comes to mind only because he has incorporated the extremely wide-angle anamorphic lenses and idiosyncratic music selection which harks from the 1970’s since Rushmore—which, for the record, came out six years before Dynamite. In fact, the name Napoleon Dynamite isn’t a Hess creation—it’s one of Elvis Costello’s nicknames. But Hess and Anderson do have separate qualities…in the same way Ann Coulter has separate qualities from some who’s not psychotic. Where Anderson uses his quick zoom shot to set up emotional distance between family members (think Gene Hackman’s introduction to his estranged grandkids in Royal Tenenbaums), Hess uses it to set up a fart. Never has someone put so much eccentricity in an imbecilic pursuit.

As producer and star, Black doesn’t help things by keeping his character a three-dimensional figure. It can be a decent character, except when those three dimensions are: A) he’s fat, B) he has a porn mustache and C) he speaks with an exaggerated Mexican accent. After that, we know little of Ignacio/Nacho except that he searches for respectability. Black usually can get away with being a shallow buffoon when there are other sympathetic characters he can work his charisma on—like his musical prodigy classroom from School of Rock. But Ignacio’s ambition never extends to the children as much as his need for admiration. Which makes Black usual jackassery even more grating. The crowning achievement of Black’s failure is when, with fifteen minutes to go, he breaks out into his balladeer persona from Tenacious D—an amusing, yet completely unnecessary part of the film which chews up 2 minutes of screen time until the next scene. It’s a perfect microcosm of Nacho Libre: It’s what makes Black a funny actor isn’t seen until it’s too late. It exposes Hess as a random and uncreative hack who needs another random scene to fill in for actual film. And in the end, no one in the theater laughed until we realized we paid to see this.

Michael Jones is a film critic living in San Francisco.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com