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Shelf Beauties
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Nacho Libre Jack Black stars as Ignacio – the cook at a Mexican orphanage run by friars. Since he was a young boy, Nacho, as he is called by his friends, has dreamed of becoming a famous and respected luchador (wrestler), but the friars and other religious figures look down on the profession as unholy, so he hides his desire under a cloak of shame (the guys who wrote Nacho Libre wish they came up with a line like that!). One day, he realizes, as a wrestler, he could make some money to buy better food for the poor, starving orphans, and impress the beautiful new nun, Sister Encarnacion (Ana de la Reguera), so by night he becomes the masked and mysterious luchador, Nacho Libre. Unfortunately, he and his tag team partner, Esqueleto (Hector Jimenez), can’t win a match, even though the fans like them. Will Nacho and Esqueleto win a match so they can become professional luchadors? Will Nacho and Sister Encarnacion pursue their forbidden love? Nacho Libre is a funny movie you desperately want to embrace with your heart and funny bone, but the film never lives up to its potential of being a classic silly comedy, so you want to put the writers and director in a headlock. Writers Jerusha Hess and Bill White, along with co-writer/director Jared Hess, don’t give Black and the rest of the cast enough material to make the movie amazing. Even though they understand which elements need to be in the story, Nacho Libre has a very straight forward, simple, but flat plot that never grows complicated enough to demand the audience’s attention. The movie needs more humor and better development of the smaller subplots and characters, and less jokes about farting. To make this type of movie appreciable, the writers have to immerse themselves in every nuance and minor detail because that's where the funny stuff comes from. In Nacho Libre, it feels like they didn't want to try that hard (it’s easy to take the money for writing a script, it’s hard to put together a good one). For example, you have probably seen the commercials where Nacho and Esqueleto train for their big matches with a strange regime that includes trying to avoid a bull, or shooting arrows at each other. It’s a funny sight gag, but could be so much better if Nacho had some dialogue explaining why they are doing this as some sort of old school training program that the greats used to follow back in the day (complete with pictures and stories from magazines Nacho has saved over the years). This kind of exposition would add some flavor to the scenes, show us how much Nacho has studied wrestling for this moment, and make the characters seem even sillier. Instead, White and the Hesses take the easy way out and go for the quick, cheap laugh hoping the audience will guffaw because Nacho and his buddy are doing something stupid. This happens time and time
again as we never learn much
about Esqueleto and his dreams, or what experiences Sister Encarnacion
has been
through to make her want to fall for Nacho.
Other sub-plots are hinted at, but never developed
like a rivalry between
Nacho and the leading wrestler in My hate for Black has been well known (I was the guy who called him Bill Murray without the talent), but he has won me over with King Kong and this film. In Nacho Libre, Black displays some of his best characterization ever as he becomes Nacho with a believable, yet, funny and inoffensive accent, weird hairdo and an approach that makes us laugh at how seriously Nacho takes all of this stuff, to the point his obsessive nature is silly. With the cadence of his voice and the way he physically carries himself and poses, Black makes Nacho feel like a traditional folk hero in the spirit of Bruce Lee or someone out of a Kurosawa movie. It is a brilliant performance wasted on average material that relies too much on potty humor and not enough on dialogue and exploitation of the situation. Nacho Libre is sure to make you laugh, but not as much as you should. 2 Waffles (Out Of 4) Copyright 2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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