The movie also makes Ignacio's sidekick Esqueleto too strange to sentimentalize. Ignacio meets Esqueleto, a feral ghetto starvling, when he kicks Ignacio's ass for the bag of day-old nachos Ignacio gathers for the orphans' meals. Esqueleto seems like a real contender against Ignacio, but in the ring he shrieks like an adolescent she-beast as he's pounded into the canvas. And even when he cleans up, after he and Ignacio earn one loser's purse after another, Jiménez still presents a series of uninfectious smiles to the camera. All teeth and Adam's apple, Jiménez is like a Don Knotts who isn't trying to be endearing.
Jared Hess, who co-wrote the script with his wife Jerusha Hess (they also co-wrote, and Jared directed, Napoleon Dynamite) and Mike White (who wrote The School of Rock), have the visual sense to provide the enclosed atmosphere for this wall-to-wall shagginess. It's not quite as good as Napoleon Dynamite, in part, because the plot is too central. In Napoleon Dynamite you didn't see Napoleon's triumph at the talent competition coming. Nacho Libre is a more conventional parody; like Anchorman and Strangers With Candy, it openly lampoons and yet follows the plot of a sentimental heroic romance. (Though line for line, Strangers With Candy has the nimblest and most surprising writing – as well as the most stunningly base – of any of these movies.)
But like all these recent works of unrelenting burlesque, Nacho Libre creates its own cartoon idiom, just as the majority of silent slapstick shorts, and such features as Harold Lloyd's Why Worry?, the W.C. Fields pictures Million Dollar Legs, It's a Gift, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor, Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, Robert Zemeckis's Used Cars, and Carl Gottlieb's Caveman did before them, and maybe a little more so. Nacho Libre is all it needs to be – ridiculous from beginning to end.
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