Nacho Libre (2006)

Nacho Libre arrives from 2006, directed by Jared Hess, with Jack Black wearing a friar's robe and a luchador mask in roughly equal measure. The premise is sturdy. A cook at an Oaxacan monastery secretly wrestles to keep the orphanage in tortillas. The film is loosely tethered to Fray Tormenta, the real Mexican priest who spent twenty-three years in the ring for much the same reason. Black reportedly raised his own discomfort about playing a Mexican character and was told the friar was a gringo raised in Mexico. That distinction satisfied the production. It does not entirely satisfy the ledger.

What we find on inspection is a film soaked in Mexican place and custom that declines to make any argument about them. The supporting cast is largely Mexican and the setting is genuine, shot entirely in Oaxaca. None of this is offered as a statement. It is scenery, and pleasant scenery at that. Sister Encarnación exists to be gazed at across a courtyard, and she has no arc of her own. An overweight woman named Cándida appears so that Steven may flee from her in visible horror, which is the film's whole position on the subject of bodies. There is no queer presence, no environmental concern, no neurodivergent character, no reframing of the historical record. The orphanage's poverty drives the plot, but the prize money buys a bus, and the film ends content.

The picture never stops to instruct us, and for that we should be grateful. It is a loud, silly sports comedy with a one-joke engine and no interest in moral instruction of any kind. The result is a low-proof vintage: broad, harmless, culturally adjacent, unlikely to trouble anyone's conscience. It goes down easily. It leaves nothing behind.