Like a lot of folk, I enjoyed Napoleon Dynamite. I found it funny, charmingly quirky with a sense of heart. So I looked forward to Nacho Libre, Hess' follow up, which starred Jack Black as a priest moonlighting as a masked wrestler. From the guy that brought us Napoleon Dynamite, how could he go wrong with that concept? Well, if you saw Nacho Libre, you know how he did. And it's the same with Gentlemen Broncos, another good concept, fledgling writer has his cheesy sci-fi novel stolen by a veteran writer, that is totally fumbled by Hess. Methinks Napoleon worked more through the strength of the cast and Hess's own inexperience. But the more experienced he gets, the worse his films get. GB doesn't have a bad cast, all are talented performers, but you might have to see them in other pictures to realize that. Hector Jimenez in particular, is just too quirky for his own good. A lot of the characters are, too the point that they're caricatures, and it's hard to care about caricatures. Like Nacho Libre, Hess likes parading unusual looking extras in front of the cameras, but instead of us feeling for them, it's like he's the barker at a freak show just pointing out, "Hey man, lookit this one, boy he's weiiiird!" That sense of heart I enjoyed so much in Napoleon Dynamite is definitely missing. As a fan of those trashy sci-fi novels that made up the title sequence, and obviously served as inspiration for this movie, there are homages present in GB that I liked. Yeast Farms, clone armies, robo-stags not as unusual as you might think. Jemaine Clement and Sam Rockwell are both very funny in their roles, but seeing as how Jemaine Clement IS the antagonist, it's sort of a shame he isn't used more. There's a lot of stuff that should have been cut, and in the hands of a better director a really cool concept wouldn't have gone to waste. Maybe someone can plagiarize it and realize the potential that Hess has wasted once again.
Review of Gentlemen Broncos
