Napoleon Dynamite - Film Review

Film review.

In small-town Preston, Idaho, awkward teen Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) has trouble fitting in, after his grandmother is injured in an accident. Having said that, I didn’t really get that because the film was badly conceived and made. I basically had to look on the internet to work out what the film was supposed to be about because while watching it I had trouble figuring out the point to the movie and what the characters were trying to accomplish by the end.

Although, it was bad I will sadly admit that there were parts that I giggled or smiled at and the dancing was good and enjoyable to watch. Those were not good enough though to overshadow the bad parts of the movie to make it good. Therefore I’ll stick with the 'it’s a bad movie' as a conclusion. Laughing at the comedy in this confusing film gave it some reason to not doze off. We sometimes laugh at characters in films so we feel superior to the characters, or because we pity or like them. Napoleon is tall, ungainly, depressed, and happy to be left alone. He has red hair, it must take him hours in front of the mirror to look so bad. Napoleon is picked on cruelly and routinely. He finally makes a single friend, Pedro the school's only Latino, and manages his campaign for class president. I insanely started not liking Napoleon from the start when I heard his voice and the way he ran.

The movie was trying too hard to be funny this led them to fail. The movie was not engaging so a lot of the jokes went over my head. A lot of factors made me not like Napoleon, for example his extended mouth breathing which was just painful to listen to. The story takes shape slowly. Napoleon lives with his brother, Kip their boisterous grandmother and a bored llama. When Grandma cracks her coccyx in a motorbike accident, Uncle Rico comes to baby-sit, even though Kip, the elder brother, is 32. Napoleon Dynamite is a movie trying desperately to be quirky and succeeding. It’s weird, odd, and seems to have no loftier goal than being freakish. The movie lacks any real heart or emotion and thus fails to connect on any sort of deeper level. Napoleon seems fairly unaffected by his surroundings. Things like rejections and bullying leave him unmarred as he crawls into a mental fantasy world of unicorns and nun chucks. There are a lot of reasons to find movies funny, but I’m never comfortable when asked to chuckle simply because I feel superior to someone. Napoleon Dynamite gropes about for humour by watching Napoleon and his equally pathetic family do things which label them as inferior.