And maybe, given Napoleon Dynamite’s breakout success and the pockets of isolated but hysterical laughter I heard in the screening room, some of this wan dialogue actually will pass into common parlance. Nacho Libre’s writers-Jared Hess, his wife Jerusha, and the usually funny Mike White-treat every non sequitur as if it were a surefire cult catchphrase. But at this point in his career, fresh from his flat role in King Kong, Black risks falling into the dreaded Robin Williams Vortex-the career trajectory of the comic whose manic energy is diverted into increasingly unfunny projects until, finally, he becomes unfunny himself.īlack has the potential to be the rare comedian capable of making lemons into lemonade, but the fruit he’s squeezing here is bone-dry. Black has inspired moments even in Nacho Libre, particularly when his character bursts into spontaneous song. His sheer physical exuberance reminds me of Judy Miller, the preteen Girl Scout character Gilda Radner used to play on Saturday Night Live, who bounced on her bed belting disco tunes into a hairbrush. Jack Black is a force of nature, a spectacularly antic performer who falls outside categories like actor, singer, or comedian. Soon, the two are making money as a Laurel-and-Hardy wrestling tag team, getting their asses handed to them by masked behemoths named things like “Ramses” and “El Snowflake.” But what if Esqueleto and Nacho got serious about the sport and started to do some ass-handing of their own? In a back-alley scuffle over a discarded bag of tortilla chips, Ignacio meets up with Esqueleto (Hector Jimenez), a tall, scrawny beggar who manages to wrestle the chunky monk into submission. Ignacio speaks, mysteriously, in Americanized slang (“So anyways, let’s get down to the neety-greety”) and follows up grandiose pronouncements with a self-deprecating “whatever.” But he dreams big dreams, doodling drawings of himself as a lucha libre wrestler and lusting chastely after the angelically hot Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera). Jack Black plays Brother “Nacho” Ignacio, a monk who works as a cook in an Oaxacan orphanage, as a Latino numskull with an accent somewhere between Ricky Ricardo and Ren of Ren & Stimpy. At least three-quarters of Nacho Libre’s jokes rest on the assumption that being Mexican is inherently hilarious.

Nacho libre song