It was when Jack Black, as the titular Nacho in NACHO LIBRE, turns his back to the camera and flexes his polyester-encased buttocks within an inch of their lives that I realized something. Even if I’d had the foresight to bring some with me, there was not enough alcohol or any other conscious-altering substance out there to make this flick bearable. I’m not sure that a swift blow to the head with a crowbar would be enough to make the nightmare end entirely. So potent is the putrescence that it may well have the power to still torture any synapses still firing even if the brain itself is in a non-aware state.
Black, who is co-producer, has hijacked the film and turned material that needs a deadpan, if not subtle touch, into his own personal rumpus room. It is obvious that he is having a wonderful time in the leotard, cape, and luchador mask that constitutes his wresting costume. If only the audience were having as good a time. Black mugs, snorts, wiggles his eyebrows (visible even with the mask), and strikes poses that in some alternate universe, one without a sense of humor as we understand the term, are hilarious. Alas, here in the universe to which we are confined, it’s merely excruciating.
The script is co-written by Jared Hess of NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE fame, and here and there the glimmer of what made that film so wildly original and insanely wonderful peeks through. That would be mainly in the character of the stoic Esqueleto (Hector Jimenez), Nacho’s lanky wresting sidekick with a serious weakness for corn and corn products, and a mouthful of excessive teeth that meander along his gums in a leisurely fashion. As for the rest, things unfold randomly, quickly becoming an incoherent blathering mess. This is not the anarchic non-sequitor of Monty Python with its musings on dead parrots or the joyful silliness of Abbot and Costello going a few rounds of “Who’s On First?”. This is preening self-satisfaction on Black’s part that begins with refried beans snorting out of his nose, continues with the de rigeur fart joke, and then rambles off into a cow pie interlude that makes no sense whatsoever, never mind not being funny. Anything and everything is thrown onto the screen in a way that suggests someone edited the film from what few moments to be found that were less awful than the rest while simultaneously being badly distracted by a particularly gnarly rabid dog.
As for the story, that would concern Ignacio, aka Nacho, a Mexican friar (Black) who dreams of using his lifelong dream of becoming a masked wrestler, or luchador, in order to impress the beautiful new nun (Ana de la Reguera) at the orphanage where he toils as a very bad cook, oh, and by the way, improve the orphans’ lot. His dream comes true, sort of, and along with all the other effluvia, there are sequences of Nacho enduring the lucha libre, a brutal sort of wrestling that may or may not involve shaggy dwarves with horns as featured here.
NACHO LIBRE is ghastly enough to qualify as a horror film, and one that offers a supremely brutal experience that is not for the faint of heart, or robust of taste.
Your Thoughts?