For a movie that many people (including me) tagged as this summer’s off-the-beaten-path sleeper hit, Nacho Libre turns out to be a surprisingly mild affair, one of those films where the creative juices dried up at some point between conception and execution.
The premise held promise: Nacho (Jack Black), the lowly cook at a Mexican monastery that doubles as a home for orphaned boys, realizes that becoming a wrestler would not only earn him enough money to better take care of the lads under his watch, but it might also instill enough self-confidence so that he won’t remain tongue-tied around the lovely new nun (Penelope Cruz look-alike Ana de la Reguera). But because the monks frown upon wrestling, Nacho is forced to disguise himself by donning a mask. He also picks up a sidekick in the form of a scrawny street dweller (Hector Jimenez), and together they become a less-than-dynamic duo who grow accustomed to getting hammered in the ring when pitted against professionals.
Writer-director Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) and co-scripter Mike White (The School of Rock) serve up a few potent gags (love that corn in the eye), but they’re spread mighty thin throughout the picture’s running time. The remainder of the film is split between the sort of scatological humor we can find anywhere else — See Jack Black break wind! See Jack Black sit on the toilet! See Jack Black smear animal excrement on Jimenez’s face! — and lazy south-of-the-border caricatures that aren’t funny, offensive or offensively funny. After a while, this disappointing film just lays there, like a wrestler body-slammed one time too many.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2006.
