Nacho Libre

Let’s hope this is just a hiccup in Jack Black’s career, because it’s bloody awful. There is probably a funny movie in Mexican wrestling, but this ain’t it. It’s all over the place, slow-paced … frankly, pretty stupid. In fact, I can’t recall a good movie about wrestling at all, and there’s a billion about boxing. The only other one I recollect is … All the Marbles, back in 1981, and it made the same stupid mistake as this one: It asked you to believe it’s real, and that, going into the ring, nobody knows who’s going to win. Just because it’s rigged doesn’t mean it can’t be a source for drama … and it ought to be an easy source for comedy.
And speaking of rigging … why, of all professional sports, did wrestling degenerate into puffed-up violence porn for people whose IQs are in the deep freeze range? Wrestling is a noble sport, it was in the original Olympic games in Greece, I believe. I think it’s much better than boxing, because boxers are supposed to knock their opponent out, do some damage to them, but wrestlers only seek their opponent’s submission. There are countries where it is taken very seriously indeed, and it’s a big draw at the modern Olympics. There are areas of this country where high school and collegiate wrestling is almost as big as basketball and football. And yet, when you graduate, you either have to hang up your jock strap or put on a feather boa and strut around the ring roaring like a psychotic child on steroids. It’s very odd.