Review of Nacho Libre (2006) by Markb. — 29 Jun 2006

In what promises to be a very typical movie summer stuffed with remakes, sequels and comic book adaptations (some of the above quite good; that's not the point) any time you catch sight of such an odd duck as this, you'd do well to heed its quack.

This endearingly goofy slapstick opus about a Mexican monk (Jack Black) who, in order to earn money to feed the parish orphans, indulges his fascination for Masked Marvel-type wrestling (much to the displeasure of his priestly superiors) is a true original.

(I suppose if you wanted to be really picayune about it you could note some surface similarities between this and a very straightforward 1956 B-movie entitled The Leather Saint, in which John Derek puts on the boxing gloves in order to help the needy of HIS church.

You could even wonder if, since both films were Paramount releases, if screenwriter Mike White and director Jared Hess had to pay some royalties. But if you do, that's not just being overly picky.

..it's being downright anal!) Given Black's usual amusingly over-the-top approach to his roles, which culminated last year in a full-blooded portrayal of Carl Denham in Peter Jackson's King Kong that out-hammed Robert Armstrong's work in the original, it's a real surprise to observe just how much he UNDERPLAYS his role here, and with wonderful results: at times Black even seems to be aping the hilariously off-kilter English dubbing that's a fundamental ingredient of the 1960s Mexican "Santo" epics that he and White are obvious devotees of.

Like many one-of-a-kind movies, Nacho Libre successfully blends and embraces a number of seeming contradictions: it features almost as many bodily-function-and-fluid gags as Adam Sandler's current Click (including an unforgettable cow-pasture sequence in which Nacho's tag-team partner gets LITERALLY sh*t-faced) but they come off as strangely innocent rather than obnoxious and offensive; Hess's near-Felliniesque depiction of the impoverished locals' grotesque appearances (if there ever was a town dentist, it's apparent that he used pliers and no Novacaine) doesn't make his film difficult to watch, and Nacho's mutual puppy love for a sweet young nun (Ana de la Reguera, who resembles a cross between Anne Hathaway and Winona Ryder, so who can blame him?) is just one of many factors that makes Nacho Libre, in spite of all the bone-crushing ring action, one of the GENTLEST mainstream films of the last few years! Hess, matching the deadpan tone he brought to his 2004 cult smash Napoleon Dynamite, still has some pacing issues to overcome; like his previous film, there are definite slow spots, and Nacho Libre ultimately comes off more as a series of skits than a unified whole.

But many of those skits are undeniably smile-inducers, and on the whole Nacho Libre is so engaging, offbeat and weirdly amusing that even though I wasn't at all a Napoleon fan, this makes me want to watch it again and reevaluate it.