Jack Black throws himself into 'Nacho Libre'
By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jack Black — who's sometimes best taken in smaller doses — has the opposite of typical actor vanity. In "Nacho Libre," he delivers scenes while sitting on the toilet, gobbles down oozy giant egg yolks and gets splattered by a catapulted cantaloupe. And since he's shirtless much of the movie, you'll see more of him in-the-flesh than you may care to.
Paramount Pictures
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If most movie stars give the impression they never do something as lowly as use the bathroom, Black reminds us of the opposite again and again in this Mexican wrestling spoof, which spends almost as much time in the john as it does in the ring.
Kids will eat up the movie's load of cow-poop jokes and direct kicks to the crotch. Older moviegoers, though, may find the deadpan allure of director Jared Hess' "Napoleon Dynamite" doesn't quite translate to this south-of-the-border sendup of "Rocky"-style sports flicks.
Hess co-wrote the movie with his wife, Jerusha, and Mike White (who penned the Jack Black comedy "The School of Rock"). Like "Dynamite," it unfolds in an alternate universe where the air is thicker and conversations take a beat longer than they do in our world.
An orphan raised at a Mexican mission, Ignacio, aka Nacho (Black, working a sometimes amusing accent), is now a monk in charge of feeding his young successors the same ol' runny chilaquiles every day for breakfast and whipping up soups out of a near-empty larder.
But Nacho dreams of becoming a luchador, one of the free-style wrestlers who fight wearing masks that some never take off in public. (The sport is frowned on by the church, so the mask is especially useful.)
For his fighting partner, he recruits Esqueleto (Héctor Jiménez), a rail-thin Jack Sprat sidekick to the tubby star. As a kind of training, they throw things at each other to build endurance. You know, like fruit and beehives. No, it doesn't make sense; nothing much does here. But again, if you've got kids — especially boys — they'll laugh.
The movie has some amusingly off-kilter moments, like the scene in which Nacho and luscious Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera, lovely and underused) enjoy a late-night snack of dry toast. There's a surreal visit to a house with a secret tunnel in its walls (but the tunnel comes along with cruel mockery of a young fat woman). And the big Final Fight is fun, because a finale like that is always rousing, even when it's simultaneously being sent up. But sometimes it looks like a movie that was more fun to make than it is to watch.
Black throws himself into every scene, a good or bad thing depending on your tolerance for his brand of schlubby humor. And Jiménez is as memorable for his gaunt gawkiness as for his girl-like screams.
If you get on "Nacho Libre's" intentionally offbeat wavelength, you may have an OK time. The biggest problem is that Hess, shooting in Oaxaca, hired extras based on their irregular features, odd facial hair, crossed eyes or all-out ugliness. And that's ugly itself. The result feels at least disrespectful to Mexicans, if not outright racist.
Sure, Federico Fellini liked to fill his movies with human grotesques, too. But there was usually a sense of affection behind that decision. Here, the unprofessional actors come across as the punch line to a mean-spirited joke.
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