Sweet hearted but slow and barely droll.

Rating: 6/10 (17 June 2006)

I went to see this hoping to get a good laugh. Mostly I smiled instead. What could have been an interesting fable turns out instead to have squandered much of it's opportunities. It's the first Jack Black movie for me - I don't count King Kong - and I found his humor, of mostly sight gags, to be soft and airless. He may be one of the top comedians in American movies today, but I find most of those people to be very weak replacements to the comic geniuses of the past. Tom Hanks is the last comedian I found to be genuinely creative and intrinsically funny.
What did interest me was the total use (or was it misuse?) of a foreign culture as the comedic environment. I guess it's up to the Mexicans to decide whether Black is lovingly teasing them for gentle or harder purpose. When they make fun of themselves, that's one thing. When we make fun of them, we are walking a tightrope.