For the 25th anniversary of Airplane!, the team of Jerry Zucker-Jim Abrams-David Zucker (ZAZ) were doing an into to the deleted scenes, which there weren’t many of. Their reasoning was simple, “There’s nothing funny on the cutting room floor.”
A movie like Napoleon Dynamite would be 45 seconds long if the filmmakers held true to that proverb. Granted the above-mentioned filmmakers have made some stinkers themselves. I don’t know what David Zucker thought he was doing with An American Carol and Jerry Zucker decided to make more straight serious movies when he got bigger clout. Sometimes, you only have so many jokes you can tell that you can’t come up with anymore without resorting to tired scatological humor or racist, sexist and misogynistic jokes.
I said Napoleon would be 45 seconds long that’s because each joke would be about 15 seconds of screen time. Sadly, most people would’ve missed the third joke because it occurs during the post-credit scene, back when something like that was almost unheard of. Now, people will sit through 15 minutes of names of people who did special effects to see some pointless post-credit scene that leads nowhere. Post-credit scenes used to be fun and rewarding. Those were the days, right?
Anyway, one of those three scenes consist of the titular character played by Jon Heder getting hit in the face with a piece of steak thrown by his horrible Uncle Rico (Jon Gries). This happens as for some reason, Rico and Napoleon’s pedophile-looking older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), are eating steak outside on the door stoop. Why are they eating outside? So Rico can throw Kip’s steak at Napoleon. Gries is also a vegetarian so maybe there’s a joke there. Even though I don’t like jokes that are set-up this way, I laughed. And you’ll laugh too mainly because Napoleon has already been presented as such an awful character, he deserves it.
Napoleon is riding a bike that belongs to his new and possibly only friend, Pedro Sanchez (Efren Ramirez), who talks like Slowpoke Rodriguez and spends every scene starring blankly for a few seconds before responding to anything. As a matter of fact, there’s so much starring blankly by so many characters in this movie that I fill director Jared Hess, who co-wrote the script with his wife, Jerusha, realized they didn’t have enough material for an hour and a half movie so they threw in a lot of long pauses and blank stares from the characters to pad the time. And Pedro speaks slower too to pad the run time as well.
This whole movie feels like it should be a Coen Brothers fanfiction movie with a touch of John Waters’ Hairspray as if it was made in the style of Wes Anderson but didn’t have the necessary budget. Napoleon is a high school student at a rural Idaho school where he basically works overtime to make himself the type of nerd other nerds would ignore. His hair is remnant of Timothy Busfield’s Arnold Poindexter from the Revenge of the Nerds movie and his voice is in the stye of comic-actor Steven Wright but without the sharp wit.
Napoleon becomes friendly with Pedro because in 2004, his family is the only Latino family to move to the town which further perpetuates the stereotypes of how racist and bigoted Idaho is. But I can get that Hess and his wife think by loading the movie down with a bunch of weird, eccentric people, everyone will find it funny. Even the school’s principal or assistant principal looks like he time-traveled from rural Texas 1977. Not every character in a movie can be eccentric. If you’re going to pull it off, you better be damn good at it. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Waters and even David Lynch can do it because they work on their characters with the same actors who can play them correctly.
Unfortunately, Hess isn’t good at doing what others have done. Napoleon and Kip live with their grandmother (Sandy Martin) who’s home decor hasn’t changed since 1977. She also enjoys riding dune buggies with her boyfriend. That might have made a better movie. But she is injured and Rico who lives in a van from the same Carter Administration era comes to take care of the two. (Yet, they never seem to check on their grandmother. She just escapes the movie for the most part for the convenience of the plot).
Napoleon and Pedro become friends and after Pedro is rejected by the preppy girl, Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff), he decides to run for class president too. Mainly it’s to give the movie a plot that it never fully works with. Rico is also living in the past that if he had won that big football game he would’ve been the state’s governor or some rich bigwig. He begins a door-to-door business on selling herbal breast augmentations supplements. Reminder, this movie came out in 2004 and is set in the early 2000s. If anyone came to your door selling breast augmentation supplements, they would’ve had the door slammed on their face. And there’s nothing about Rico’s appearance that looks welcoming, even in Idado.
Diedrich Bader pops up as Rex who operates the marital arts school and wears American-flag pattern pants. Bader appears in two scenes and looks like he filmed them both in the same day, if within the same hour because he interacts with as little people on screen as possible. And if you’re wondering why every top 40 radio song for the latter 2000s played a sound bite of “Bow to your sensei,” he says it here. Rex is also married to Starla (Carmen Brady) who is supposed to be a bodybuilder but some might think she’s transgender. Considering the time frame, it might have been the intended joke. She only exists for Rico to show her the values of breast augmentation with some cookware and for Rex to arrive home to find him getting too close. Rex does what any sane person in 2004 would’ve done and beats his ass.
At the same time, Napoleon seems to get interested in a geeky nerdy girl, Deb (Tina Majorino), who is shy and wears her pony-tail off to the side, you know because she has to be eccentric. They have no spark and Napoleon insults her at first by asking does she think she’s fat because she’s drinking 1 percent milk. Napoleon isn’t quirky, he’s obnoxious. He goes out of his way to be avoidable by being curt with younger kids who are being friendly and maintaining Baron Munchausen-style lies about his life when being ragged on by his peers. The movie wants to make Napoleon out to be a geeky anti-hero, but he brings a lot of his bullying upon himself. When Summer’s boyfriend, Don (Trevor Snarr), who is also one of Napoleon’s bullies, hands him a campaign button, Napoleon just turns around and throws it down a hallway. Why? Who knows? Is it funny? Not at all.
In the end, we’re supposed to see Napoleon as a hero because he does a stupid dance for Pedro at the school assembly because Pedro didn’t know he had to provide a talent portion. Of course Pedro wins. But does Hess think it’s because people like Pedro? No, it’s student body government. People probably voted for Pedro as a joke. Or they secretly detest Summer who we’re supposed to hate because she didn’t want to date Pedro. So, naturally, Summer has to be the stereotypical cruel blonde girl in a teen movie.
But wait, I was telling you about the only jokes that work. As for those two other jokes. One consists of Napoleon drawing a pencil portrait of a girl, Trisha Stevens (Emily Kinnard), who is forced to go to a dance with him by her mother who likes Rico for some reasons. The pencil portrait is bad and Kinnard’s reaction to seeing it is hilarious.
The third joke consists of Kip marrying LaFawndah Lucas (Shondrella Avery), a black woman from Detriot, he has been talking to online. A man, presumed to be LaFawndah’s brother, buries his head in his hand during the wedding ceremony knowing clearly that everyone can see it. Yes, we feel your pain. We know exactly how you’d feel. Of course, LaFawndah has to be overdone in a way that would be racist if this wasn’t intended as a comedy. And she decides to give Kip a makeover that might have been funny for one hour in 1984 when the first white kid did it after seeing Breakin‘. But white people “acting black” hasn’t been funny for a while.
At the wedding is a goofy farmer, Lyle (Dale Critchlow), who the filmmakers exploit for his facial appearance. We’re supposed to laugh at how his voice sounds. And during a scene where he shoots a cow for an unknown reason, it just so happens as a school pulls up nearby so all the kids can scream in horror. I’m sure Hess thought it would be a laugh riot.
I remember 20 years ago people at my workplace were raving about it. And I was in my mid-20s myself so I was the the target audience. When it finally aired on HBO during the summer of 2005, I watched the first 30 minutes and didn’t laugh once. Later, I found myself trying to watch it but couldn’t, even though I caught the gist of the plot periodically over the constant airing on premium movie channels through the mid-2000s before he vanished. I thought it would be like Super Troopers or Office Space (which Bader was also in).
However, the difference is that the filmmakers of those movies loved their characters and you could sympathize with them despite their flaws. There’s nothing about any character in this movie that’s likeable. Pedro is a walking stereotype. All the other characters are meant to be antagonistic or they’re only there to help Napoleon and Pedro. I guess Hess and Heder thought if they make Napoleon so outrageous, people would like him. But you can see where they’re trying so hard. During one scene where Napoleon meets LaFawndah after doing an aerobics workout and sweating, he drinks a Gatorade or Powerade with a foolish gusto you can just see it’s so young kids could emulate it.
The 2000s was a weird time for movies. I think 9/11 and two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with a President that more than half the country didn’t like made people feel uncomfortable. We didn’t know what was funny and what wasn’t. Napoleon Dynamite opened in June of 2004, about eight months after Jack Black made us think playing a guitar in a classroom was all you need for humor in School of Rock. And that movie had about three good jokes too. (Little did we know there, Linklater was doing it as a paycheck for his pet project Boyhood, which you probably already forgotten.)
Then, Harold and Kumar Goes to White Castle came out in the latter part of the summer and Judd Apatow gave us Seth Rogen, for better and for worse, in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. However, they cared about their main characters. And even though there was that awful Clippers fan joke in the Bewitched movie, people finally realized comedy wasn’t just Will Ferrell screaming for 90 minutes. Napoleon Dynamite just happened to be a movie that came out to fill the void. Within years, it was almost forgotten and even the Vote for Pedro shirts seemed tacky. There was an attempt to spin the movie off into an animated series in 2012. It lasted six episodes. It shows that a lot of people really didn’t like the movie.
Despite a budget of $400,000, the movie made over $45 million, which isn’t bad. But I attribute a lot of it success to people seeing it due to word of mouth only to discover it wasn’t near as good as they had been told. Social media was still very primitive so you didn’t have people praising or jeering at a movie all over the internet. I also believe that studios and producers would have people write fake reviews on imdb.com.
I think what really irritates me so much about this movie is that it insists upon itself so much. Hess thinks the movie should be put up on a pedestal because it was PG-rated and filmed entirely in Idaho. You can make a comedy without resorting to tasteless and raunchy jokes. But a comedy should have some good jokes. People have said Napoleon is a neurodivergent. I don’t think so. I think he just wants to be a jerk to people. Hess and Heder want to make Napoleon an underdog but there’s no reason to root for him to win especially since he doesn’t win anything at all.
Heder has said he’s up for a possible sequel with a darker tone. The darker tone would be Napoleon coming into his 40s and realizing he can’t keep living with his grandma as he is constantly fired from jobs.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 