Napoleon Dynamite

Eccentric cult family comedy doesn’t come any better than this. Gifted comic Jon Heder plays ultimate cybernerd Napoleon Dynamite and with director Jared Hess’s help, succeeds in turning him into a likeable anti-hero who you soon root for, merely because he’s not part of the in-crowd. Napoleon comes from a wildly eccentric family – if anything, Napoleon’s wacky elder brother, looking for love on the internet, is even funnier than Napoleon, as he transforms in the background once he gets a girlfriend.

Napoleon hangs out with misfits because in a way, he would be considered to be an outsider in the same way. There’s Mexican Pedro and lacking in confidence Deb (Tina Majorino) and Napoleon’s Uncle Pedro who cursing his lack of breaks as a failed Quarterback buys a wacky time machine in the hope that he can return to a bygone age and alter his fortunes.

Napoleon Dynamite as a film comes from the Dumb and Dumber stable but its isn’t so out-and-out comedy ; it doesn’t set out to poke fun at the characters but it does show the humour in their everyday lives and if anything is merely finding decent cult comedy out of the eccentricities of closet suburban America. When Napoleon takes on the beautiful people in his college class, hoping to be voted class President, its easy to recall Muriel’s Wedding where again the gooky outsider was pitted (with our sympathy) against the beautiful in-crowd.

It would be wrong to go overboard and say that ND is the cleverest satire to emerge from the US indie stable for a while, but it compares favourably with films like Election (1999) and Ghost World (2000) so if you liked either of those films, you’ll love this one.

Matt Arnoldi