Teaming eccentric director Jared Hess with rapid-simmer funnyman Jack Black in Nacho Libre, about a cook at an impoverished Mexican orphanage who dons a mask to wrestle in the off-the-wall Lucha Libre ring, must have seemed like a foolproof idea for comedy lightning.
Hess had a smash with the quirky cult hit Napoleon Dynamite. Black, an anything-goes comic who scored tremendously as the wild-man music teacher in School of Rock and more recently tried to tame King Kong, is a blazing star.
But Nacho Libre only works in fits and starts in its Rocky-esque plot. The principal problem is that the script by Hess and Mike White isn't funny enough for Black's rousingly manic wild streak. The jokes are lumbering and the story always takes the easy and obvious road, even missing a few sure-fire jokey ideas in the process. In a very silly sequence in which Nacho hopes to improve his machismo by climbing up a precipitous cliff to raid an eagle's nest and drink the contents of the eggs laid there, the really funny element that's missing is the mother eagle herself.
The heart that the film tries to wear -- hinting at a possible romance between Black's Nacho and Ana de la Reguera's Sister Encarnacion -- seems manufactured.
Worse, the Lucha Libre bouts, in which many of the wrestlers wear elaborate masks, seem mostly silly. That's especially true of a tag-team match between Nacho and his partner Esqueleto (Hector Jimenez) and a pair of pygmies wearing furry headdresses with horns. (Like all the luchadores seen in Nacho Libre, they're real wrestlers, in real life fighting under the name of Satan's Helpers.) The sight of these two long-maned creatures wearing grimacing face masks is hilarious -- for about one second. Then their hopping around on the mat while screeching loudly seems outrageous and bizarre.
The plot is modest. Nacho, a priest-in-training, needs more money to buy better food for the boys and friars in the orphanage, now on a diet of refried beans and nachos at every meal. Nacho hatches a plan to go into the free-wheeling Lucha Libre ring in Oaxaca and win some money. He enlists a feral character -- Esqueleto, who is the sort of laid-back Napoleon character in this film. Their Rocky-like training regimen -- involving cow dung, angry bees, an angrier bull -- is only marginally amusing. Like the ring action, one gets the impression that the filmmakers thought this was a lot funnier than it actually is.
Although Black occasionally gets to use his trademark maniacal gleam-in-the-eye when he's hatching a scheme, there's nothing much else about the script that's subtle. Sadly, it's reduced to trading on flatulence for the punch line in several scenes.
Jimenez, with his sad-eyed sensitivity and well-meaning goofball antics, steals every scene from scene-stealer Black, whose boisterous performance in a curly black wig steamrollers over the script.
Nacho Libre rolls along to its inevitable and improbable match between Nacho, who loses regularly in the ring, and the imposing, gold-masked Ramses (Cesar Gonzales), something of a national hero who drives a gold Cadillac.
Oddly, the film's final scenes are ambiguous about what will happen to the main characters next. That fact stirred a frightening thought: that some producer might already be planning Nacho Libre Dos.
**
Nacho Libre
Starring: Jack Black, Hector Jimenez, Ana de la Reguera, Richard Montoya, Cesar Gonzalez.
Rated: PG, contains violence.
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