No holds barred

Reviewed - Nacho Libre: Nacho Libre is a hilariously deadpan comedy that loves its stereotypical Latinos, writes Donald Clarke

JARED Hess's last film, the hilarious Napoleon Dynamite, won favour by trading in any number of familiar quirks from American independent cinema while somehow remaining utterly, bracingly original. Nacho Libre, in which Jack Black's Mexican monk takes up wrestling to help pay for improvements in the local orphans' meals, finds the director consolidating and honing his comic paraphernalia.

Once again the characters, none of whom seems to suspect he or she is in a comedy, exhibit an unshakable seriousness throughout. As before, strange, petty obsessions characterise their interactions. "Well, my favourite colour is light tan. My favourite animal is puppies. I like serving the lord, hiking and playing volleyball," Sister Encarnación, the novice with whom Nacho is inappropriately obsessed, murmurs to her admirer.

Hess, a practicing Mormon who collaborates with his wife, Jerusha, on his scripts, has succeeded in creating an unsettling, but endlessly amusing, cinematic landscape. Everybody is a little bit creepy, but nobody is properly nasty.

Nacho Libre has, however, gone down poorly with the American critics and their public. Indeed, reviewers have, to stretch a relevant metaphor, donned leotards, climbed up onto the ropes and leaped upon the film from a painful height.

Certainly, the picture could be seen as racist. Black, whose character is, to be fair, half-Scandinavian, delivers his lines with the tortured twang Mel Blanc brought to bear on Speedy Gonzales. And his tag-team partner, a skeletal atheist (played hysterically by Héctor Jiménez) may exhibit worryingly stereotypical degrees of Latin torpor. But Hess's tone is so affectionate that only the angriest cultural commissar could take serious offense.

Others may object to the occasional outbursts of sentimentality. But, unlike the increasingly drippy films of the Farrelly Brothers, Naco Libre seems aware of its own soppiness and rarely fails to make a joke of it. "I hate all the orphans in the world!" Jiménez' Esqueleto declares, thus pointing up the deliberately cheesy nature of the setup and simultaneously propelling the godless wrestler along a character arc that nicely parodies those in more conventional Hollywood comedies.

None of which is to imply that the picture's prime objective is to provide anything other than big, dumb fun. Featuring a more than usually restrained performance by Black, Nacho Libre buzzes with humorous energies from peculiar undiscovered planets. Let your guard down and it may pin you to the canvas.