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80What's rare to see, and what ultimately makes Nacho Libre so enjoyable, is the story of an underdog who's allowed to remain a humble clown all the way to becoming a hero.
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80Endearingly ridiculous.
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Hess' deadpan dorks are strange, really strange. As in the Christopher Guest movies, there is a distinct comedy architecture you recognize from the opening minutes.
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75Black's caped "luchador" grows on you. Like a fun guy.
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75What is missing in plot and character development is made up for in silly fun.
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70An amiably clunky, unapologetically silly summer confection that nevertheless lands sufficient lethal slams to the funny bone.
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The movie is semi-infantile camp but often riotous.
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70Nacho Libre strikes a delicate balance of whimsy and absurdity that may surprise auds primed to expect wall-to-wall slapstick.
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67You either come into Nacho Libre ready to surrender yourself to Hess' quirks and smirks or you don't. Middle ground is virtually impossible to imagine.
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The film is easy to take and easy to forget, even with Black running around Oaxaca in turquoise wrestling tights.
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63The movie is a bauble, but it's an enjoyably weird and original one, and it is anchored by Black's constantly amusing performance.
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63The sweetness of Nacho's nature, along with Black's unselfconscious physical enthusiasm, turn all this into a live-action cartoon, with the ring violence having no greater consequence than a Wile E. Coyote fall from a high place.
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60A daft idea perfectly calibrated to Black's pop mania, then hermetically sealed by a director who thinks he's making a Hal Hartley movie.
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58It's weird, clean, good-natured fun, and it's far too subdued for its madcap milieu.
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58Nacho Libre enhances Hess' reputation as a gifted filmmaker and suggests there's more to Black than manic dementia. Both director and actor, however, need to find projects better-suited to their respective (and often impressive) talents.
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50This Nacho leaves your palate longing for more spice and less rancid cheese.
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50The comedy is hit and miss, with good bits interrupted by dead patches. It's a movie to root for more than to enjoy.
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50Very broad and very silly, it's a doodle of a comedy -- a one-joke idea (fat guy goes luchador) padded out to feature length by Black's willingness to do anything for a laugh.
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50Too much in Nacho Libre doesn't work to enable me to recommend it to anyone except a card-carrying member of the Jack Black fan club.
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50When he runs out of material to tickle with, Black dips into his musically tenacious "deedle-diddle-dee" for some sure-fire ridiculousness.
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50This is a comedy at cross-purposes -- by turns low-key, bombastic, mildly amusing, manically slapstick. At least there are the fart jokes as a connecting thread.
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50The two stars of Nacho Libre, Jack Black and Jack Black's hair, take different paths.
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50As with "Napoleon Dynamite," Hess' sense of humor is an acquired taste, where all the characters speak in peculiar cadences and are afflicted with a terminal case of the "quirkies." What's unfortunately missing from Nacho Libre is much in the way of humor.
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50Infinitely more entertaining than anything the WWE has done recently, this sophomore outing from "Napoleon Dynamite" director Hess is full of cheesy goodness, but it's Velveeta.
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50By making Nacho a do-gooder, Hess defuses Black's subversive energy. You could argue that Black also played a do-gooder in "School of Rock," but the kids in that film were a lot spunkier, and Black wasn't constantly playing for sympathy as he does here.
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50Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.
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Nacho Libre plays like a Jack Black best-of, down to the song he wrote and performs for de La Reguera that sounds like some Tejano version of a Tenacious D throwaway.
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50Once Nacho gets the wrestling bug, though, it's all about Jack Black the irrepressible clown, and the comedy dies a slow death for lack of fresh ideas.
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50Is it funny? Now and then. Stupid? Very. Racist? Possibly. Ugly? Profoundly. Wild? Undeniably. Singular? Completely.
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50There are many scenes of mock-lucha wrestling, which become as boring as actual wrestling. Nacho Libre, naïvely made kids' stuff, lacks such minor attributes as a decent script and supporting cast.
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50Mike White contributed to the script, and though he shares with the Hesses an innocence that can be both sweet and slightly grotesque (e.g., Chuck and Buck), his influence is most evident here in the conventional plotting.
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50How can any comedy with Jack Black as a Mexican wrestler not be gut-bustingly hilarious? Nacho Libre provides an all-too-convincing answer.
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40Sputters to an ignominious halt in the first 20 minutes.
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38It takes some doing to make a Jack Black comedy that doesn't work. But Nacho Libre does it.
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38It's a one-gag film that rises or falls on how funny you find the sight of fat, grease-slicked Jack Black crammed into spandex pants and capering like an epileptic lamb.
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33You can see what the film was going for, but the jokes just sit there; you chuckle a few times, mostly out of lame hope, but you never bust a gut, never really get what you came for.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 44 out of 67
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Mixed: 6 out of 67
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Negative: 17 out of 67
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EricP.8
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Kimw.10
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MikeO.10hilarious