Attack Of The New And Improved Formula Movie

Rating: 4/10 (20 June 2006)

We can only guess the conversation between husband and wife writing team Jared and Jerusha Hess went something like this, "Holy smokes honey, our agent says he can sell whatever we want and make a big studio movie with a real movie star!" "But I'm only good at writing about uncomfortable people from a peculiar subculture as I did with our hit film Napoleon Dynamite." "Well, in Mexico, where went on my mission to spread our church's interesting version of history, I became familiar with Catholicism and the quaint luchador wrestling sport. I also have watched many many grainy Mexican movies and I think that I can successfully mimic their hyper dramatic style to humorous effect." "Well, by adding several fart jokes and some beans coming out of Jack Black's nose, I think I can write a great script that will be both funny, racist and insulting to Mexicans." "We're from Utah, honey, people expect us to be insulting to Mexicans!" "This is gonna be awesome, where's my sweet new laptop?" Yes folks, beans come out of Jack Black's nose for a gag and a laugh. Hey, I too found Napoleon Dynamite charming. Please don't read this and tell me, "Well, you just don't get that special humor." No, I know what was supposed to be funny and a great deal of this movie just wasn't.
It looks like Jared and Jerusha Hess are now stealing jokes from Garrison Keillor. I did not write this down in the theater (as it was dark and boring in there) but Jack Black, who plays Nacho, the friar slash aspiring wrestler, is showing the lovely Sister Encarnación a photo of his parents and he says something like, "My mother was a Lutheran Missionary, my father was a Mexican Catholic. They wanted to convert each other but got married instead." You scream: Hey, that's not a funny thing to put in your review, Chris.
I answer: Well, it wasn't funny when I paid full price to see it in the movie theater either! From the way I sound, you'd think I was going to give this thing one star and be done with it. But I can't. Jack Black, fumbling through his hideously inconsistent attempt at a Mexican accent, saves the experience a little bit. I can suffer through some really stupid fart jokes just to see how Jack's going to deliver the next line.
What I don't get is how he can team up with Nickelodeon and make a movie obviously only a ten year old can enjoy, after creating songs like "Fluck Her Gently," the animated video for which depicts him and his Tenacious D partner teaching the devil how to love his women more kindly, in extremely hard core animation.
Maybe some people are going to applaud Jared and Jerusha for making a straight PG feature full of all kinds of family values. I would applaud them if that is what they had done. But they didn't. They might think they did but when they cast the lovely Ana de la Reguera in the role of a nun, they hardly had family values on their mind. Jack Black's character Nacho does not have family values on his mind when he meets her. He has wonderful sex on his mind as would anyone who sees this attractive Ana. Instead of asking her for hot sex, Jack invites her up his room to eat toast. This was of course probably intended as humor. Two people in the crowded theater that I was watching in laughed. They also laughed at the fart jokes and the part in which Nacho rubs feces over the face of his side kick Esqueleto.
Bringing up Esqueleto reminds me of another thing this movie does right: Casting. I concede that it is beautifully cast. If not for the excellent faces in this movie it would be a total loss. So yes, I liked looking at the faces. Nacho has a fan who sits in the front row of the wrestling matches, he has the cross eyed kind of quirkiness that Ingmar Bergman would have included in a much better movie than this one. But Ingmar would have helped us see his eccentricities and peculiarities as endemic of the human condition. Jared Hess has nowhere near this depth. When he uses ugly people there can be no mistaking this: he is ridiculing them. Case in point: the big fat girl who tries to pull Esqueleto through an enormous rat hole in the wall of a nice home. A fat woman who uses rat holes to roam her own home? Fat? Rat? Get it? Fat people are like rats. That's the message here. Ugly people exist for the amusement of the rest of us. Hooray for Jared. I'm giving this movie three stars, so by all means, go and have a peek, but ask yourself when you see the parade of ugly people, are we laughing at them, or with them? You will see yourself back on the elementary school playground, led by Jared, laughing at the deformities of others.