Nacho Libre (2006)

Up until this flick, someone actually thought that everything Jack Black did was funny. Well, for proof of the opposite, look no further.

Call me naive, but I actually thought that Black and wrestling could be funny. And perhaps it could have been without Jared Hess at the helm with his family as co-writers. Let's start with the writing. There is no story here. At all. Just some stupid attempt at stealing from 1000 movies that are almost equally bad. That has never stopped Jack Black from being funny before, though, so something has to be new. Oh! Right! There are no jokes either. I'm pretty sure half the script reads something like: "Jack Black is fat and in leotards", "There is a fat kid that thinks Jack Black is cool" and "Mexican people are ugly". Hysterical. Not.

The only direction it seems Black gets here is "Do antics". So he does.We've seen most of them before, we know he is fat, and we know he has a decent voice (so why not give him a decent tune at least?). No one laughs. And about the direction: At times you wonder if it was too inconvenient to get all the actors together to do the shooting. All dialogue is filmed one face at a time. If you are making a drama and you use this as a tool to create distance between the characters, that's fine. In a film like this it is as misplaced as a decent joke would have been.

They fill some of the void with some very tiresome medleys with equally tiresome music, for absolutely no comic effect.

Unless you laugh every time you see a fat person smiling or stressed, there is absolutely no reason to spend your time on this, thankfully short, film.

2/10