Dynamite is a Dud
Cult Comedy or Dysfunctional Mess?

Every few years there's an art house flick that makes a splash at the Sundance Film Festival and suddenly becomes the "cool" thing to see. This year it's the tale of Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a high school nerd who lives so far outside the borders of normal behavior that merely calling him dysfunctional would be an understatement. While the film offers occasional laughs and strange storytelling, it failed to connect with me.

Written and directed by newcomer Jared Hess, Napoleon Dynamite offers a glimpse of life in a rural Idaho town. The "hero" of the story is a loser. Without friends, without much of a family, he exists on the borders of society where he could at any moment slip through the cracks. This is the guy who, ten years after graduation, will still be working at McDonalds without ever attaining a position higher than fry cook. He has no skills, no dreams, and no personality.

Heder's understated performance is not so much minimalistic as it is catatonic. One gets the feeling that he has been dosed with rhino tranquilizers before each scene. He rarely opens his eyes and seems to be trying to remember his lines -- which would explain why most of his reactions are expressed with one word exclamations and spastic, overexaggerated movements.

Hess features so many strange and unusual characters that, by comparison, Napoleon looks normal. His Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) is so obsessed with his high school glory days that he buys a time machine off of eBay in an attempt to go back 20 years. Napoleon's brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) has an online relationship with a girl named LaFawnduh. His best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) is running for class president and, because of a haircut mishap, has to wear a wig.

In high school, we all knew someone like Napoleon -- the guy who didn't seem to fit in with any activity or clique and didn't seem to care. He was his own person, unfettered by trendy clothing or a need to be seen with the right people. He was the loner, the spaz, the geek... and we made fun of him. But secretly, on some level, he fascinated us because we wondered why he didn't want to fit in. Was he just antisocial or was he trying to accomplish something that no one could understand?

While never explaining Napoleon's motivation, the film isn't afraid to target him for ridicule. Whether watching Napoleon crash a bike into a faulty ramp or see him eat tater tots out of his pants pocket, the audience is encouraged to laugh at him. But in doing so, we become the vile self-centered people that we had hoped we left behind in high school.

Napoleon comes off as a strange specimen of teen angst that could easily snap at any moment. I fully expected that halfway through the film he would start a shooting spree in the school, transforming the absurdist comedy into a tragic cautionary tale. Had it done so, it would have been very memorable. Unfortunately, Napoleon Dynamite fails to do anything at all.

The bleak landscape offers little eye candy for the film. It is as if the cast and crew were sentenced to Purgatory and, with nothing else to do, decided to make a movie about it. The entire film feels like one long joke without a punchline. I waited for something daring, something unique, to break the film from its boring routine. But in the end, perhaps most lives are merely that dull.

MY RATING: 2 out of 10.

RATED: PG
RUN TIME: 82 min.