Nothing if not esoteric: a backhanded salute to Mexican wrestling movies -- campy superhero adventures of masked luchadores with names like Santo and Blue Demon -- and, more broadly, the whole south-of-the-border wrestling subculture. Odd, offbeat, outlandish as it is, it makes a fitting, albeit unforeseeable, followup to Napoleon Dynamite for its director, Jared Hess. The hero here is a mere wannabe, the potbellied cook in a Catholic orphanage in Oaxaca by day, and by night one-half of a hapless tag team alongside a skin-and-bones petty thief who has been filching the orphanage's donated tortilla chips. The hero's mask and mission will take on Zorro-esque overtones when a pruriently interesting nun, immaculately acted by Ana de la Reguera, lays down the law: "These men fight for vanity, for money, for false pride." Better, a lightbulb goes on over his head, to fight for a school bus to take the orphans on "field trips and stuff." The gags and their laughs are appropriately small -- e.g., the pronunciation of "nitty-gritty" with a Mexican accent, or the amorous come-on of a late-night snack of burnt toast, or the Spartan training exercises utilizing such handy resources as a cow pie and a beehive -- and Hess's squared-up, flattened-out compositions are the visual equivalent of a deadpan delivery. Fat jokes and fart jokes serve, to a greater extent than desirable, to offset the esoterica. As does that John Belushi-like Joe Blow, Jack Black, working his eyebrows, nostrils, lips, etc., with all the expressiveness, the emotiveness, of a Mexican pop singer, and sporting, in addition to his robin's-egg tights with cardinal trim, a 1970s curly perm and gigolo's mustache. The whole thing might seem mildly insulting of all things Mexican, not just wrestling culture and warped English, but religion, music, food (a corncob on a stick), everything. The sympathetic (while still sardonic) portrait of Napoleon Dynamite's Latino sidekick, Pedro, surely should give the filmmaker some rope. Héctor Jiménez, Richard Montoya, Peter Stormare. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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